Undocumented Advanced Options design change?

[DonHutton]

Last week we did the same old import of AO records that we've been doing for a month now without incident and the roof fell in. We use a programmatically generated set of hundreds of AO records from our suppliers feeds to aid in stock picking and to only have those things which they have in stock on our site. When QA checking the results in the On-Line Store Manager (which is what the stock pickers use) we see that what it shows is NOT what we imported and, further, that the Advanced Options tab no longer looks like it does in the Knowledge Database.

Specifically:
1 - The stock levels are not what was imported. They seem have had the first digit chopped off.
2 - What was imported into the AO_Sufix [sic] field, which we use for stock picking, is now being displayed in the AO_Code field, which the system uses for things like stopping people from ordering out of stock or unavailable combos. Needless to say, the functionality resting on the AO_Code field is now fubar.
3 - There is a new, completely undocumented, field called GTIN. No idea what this is or if I should switch the AO_Sufix field contents to it.
4 - The AO_Sufix [sic] field, which we were using, is gone.

Is anyone else seeing things like this?

I filed a ticket three business days ago but no updates have been received for it and the on-line chat guys don't know anything about this.

[bzeltzer]

i see what you're saying on the admin but the "AO_Code" field has been there for a long time. I think it's a case of 3dcart doing something very counterintuitive (for which they have a special skill). My AO import file uses the same old headers as always (including AO_Code). Here's the kicker though, when you import into AO_Suffix, the text appears on the admin in the "CODE" field which actually isn't AO_Code. AO_Code still exists in the database but it doesn't show up on the admin (which for me is neither here nor there since, to my knowledge, that's a system assigned number). I'm not sure what you imported but my stock levels have always been in the AO_Stock field. I just tried it on a test product and they imported perfectly. This is the first two lines of my import in case it helps you to figure it out.

CapturFiles-201506168_220629.jpg

[DonHutton]

I'm not sure what you mean in your first sentence. By "Admin" do you refer to the changes in the Store Manager? I realise that "AO_Code" has been there for a long time" as we've been using it for months. I swear, however, that you used to be able to see the contents of AO_Sufix (one "f") in a column labelled "AO_Sufix" and the contents of AO_Code in an "AO_Code" column but I don't have a screen-shot to prove it. In any case the panel doesn't look like the documentation as it now has this "GTIN" thingee in it. Your piece of folklore wrt to the Code being the Sufix is much appreciated. Too bad that it's completely undocumented in the on-line documentation.

My import looked exactly like your import: see attachment for a fragment of it. And when I do an AO export I see exactly what I imported. But that's not what shows up in the Store Manager panel. The AO_Stock fields, where we too store the stock levels, are different - see attached screen shot. For example, M Red should have a stock level of 289, not 89 and M Chartreuse is in stock and shouldn't have a stock level of zero. The zero in the panel seems to be what the system looks at as people cannot now order M Chartreuse.

We can't go arround and retype these things manually in the Store Manager as there are hundreds of them that have to be updated every week - some every day. We need the Store Manager to reflect what the import/export feature has in it.

[bzeltzer]

DonHutton I just saw your response. By "admin," I'm just referring generally to 3dcart's backend administrative portion of your website. I have a thought. I could be wrong but it looks like your AO import might be generated by something other than just a spreadsheet saved as CSV. Either way, sometimes odd things happen with 3dcart imports and sometimes, as a last resort, I'm able to fix them by starting from scratch. My AO import (with data in the same fields) worked fine so you might test this using a new spreadsheet with just a few records and seeing whether it imports correctly. I suggest that you type the data to make sure you're not copying in characters that may be causing problems (such things exist...they just don't tell us). Hopefully that'll help you isolate the problem.

Also, I agree, a few weeks ago you used to see AO_CODE on the advanced options view.

3dcart doesn't document the majority of their changes. I've been asking them to document code changes for years. They told me that they thought it was a good idea but they didn't have the capability.

[GonzaloGil]

There has not been any change to the functionality, but, the field names are confusing so let me explain:

AO_Sufix = Code = The part number for that given combination. You see this on the admin.

AO_Code = Internal 3dcart code. It was never displayed on the admin, however, it is on the exports.

On the admin, indeed there is a column header named "CODE" and what's displayed there is NOT AO_CODE but AO_Sufix.

[bzeltzer]

Thanks for the clarification Gonzalo. It's always appreciated when you weigh in on things here.