Delete all products?

[philip937]

oh do you mean if say you had prod ids 1-1000

and you delete 500-1000 using easy poulate the next product will be 1001

so it would go 1-500, 1001 - ...

and if you did it manually ? then what the product id is re-used for new products?

[DrByte]

oh do you mean if say you had prod ids 1-1000

and you delete 500-1000 using easy poulate the next product will be 1001

so it would go 1-500, 1001 - ...

Yes. Deleting via EP or by manually hacking things out of the tables, or even by deleting one-by-one via the ZC admin console will leave gaps in numbers.

Using EP to delete is not what the OP was asking about in starting this thread. He/She wanted to wipe everything and presumably start from 1.

My post was merely pointing out that EP is not the right tool to accomplish that desired result.

[philip937]

how do I delete all products from my zencart store without actually going through each one? My store has 18000+ products, I need to delete all of them so I can reinstall them with the proper format...I installed ez populate, and uploaded all of them but left a single space in the image URL so none of the images show up...I need to go in delete all the old products and resubmit with the updated info...please help.

Don't remember seeing a anything about starting from 1 anywhere, however I did misread the original post.

If all you want to do is correct your mistake, you just download the cab of all your products, correct te mistake on the csv, then re-upload. Job done.

[DrByte]

See, this is why it's a bad idea for people to hijack others' threads.
You quoted the first OP, from Aug 2007.

I was responding to the Feb 2013 post by dancingbay:

I want to delete all the products and categories. I loaded the test data with my install, but want to remove it all and start fresh

[DrByte]

And now dancingbay has started a new thread: http://www.zen-cart.com/showthread.p...late-Questions

[philip937]

Oh good grief total confusion! Brain fart!

[schoolboy]

My post was merely pointing out that EP is not the right tool to accomplish that desired result.

The products use an Auto-incremented ID number - a feature of databases, which ensures that a record that requires a unique identifier, is allocated one.

This facilitates a range of options - one of the more important being to use the RELATIONAL features in a database. Other tables are able to "associate" a line of data against an established field ID - an thereby "relate" to it. This allows for considerable "compression" of information, because instead of having to duplicate (or triplicate, or quadruplicate) a line of data across several tables, one cross-references the tables and fields by using these unique ID's.

In order to ensure that NO "confusion" can exist in this "relationship" process, a database will NOT re-issue, or re-use an ID. In the general scheme of things, an ID "dies" with a record to which it applies, and the value continues to increment numerically.

Truncating a table will reset the Auto Increments to "1".

But beware... you may end up truncating only SOME of the tables which reference the product_id, meaning they are re-set to a value of "1", but you may forget to truncate others where product_id is listed. These will contain the stream of product_id's - so you will end up with one table saying product_id ### relates to "A", and another saying product_id ### relates to "B", or "C"...

This vital "checking mechanism" is rigorously protected in the normal operation of a database, mainly because having conflicts can wreak such havoc.

easypop will not reset this value... hence Dr Byte indicating that the BEST way of ensuring a "clean" database is to start from scratch. The risk of not doing this is considerable.

[philip937]

I think I understand that. Thanks for explaining :-)

Just out of curiosity, if you export a table. Then drop the table, then import the file you exported, does it carry on where it left off as if it never was gone?

[schoolboy]

I think I understand that. Thanks for explaining :-)

Just out of curiosity, if you export a table. Then drop the table, then import the file you exported, does it carry on where it left off as if it never was gone?

An export will contain ALL the configurations AND content of a table, and lets say there are NINE HUNDRED AND FOURTEEN RECORDS (914) with the export - then the CREATE TABLE command will indicate that Auto-increment must start at 915.

[DrByte]

An export will contain ALL the configurations AND content of a table, and lets say there are NINE HUNDRED AND FOURTEEN RECORDS (914) with the export - then the CREATE TABLE command will indicate that Auto-increment must start at 915.

Addendum: if there HAS EVER BEEN 914 records in the table and any of them have been deleted, the auto-increment will still say 915 for the next record. That's how auto-increment works. Mussing with that feature can leave you in a pickle if all the related tables aren't cleared of all traces of corresponding records. Be careful what you do there. You could completely cripple your site if you go fooling with autoincrements.

But now we're WAY OFF TOPIC AGAIN.