Vanishing Attributes

[NikkiAngel]

Hello I'm very new to zen and I have a question about a recent problem I have been having. I co own a digital scrap store, with downloadable products, and the past two weeks various attributes have been vanishing from their products. I have read countless threads about this and yet no one has any actual answers, just more questions and it seems no one is understanding just what it is we scrap store owners keep having issues with. Out of nowhere, a customer will place an order then send an email sayig there were no download buttons for their order, we'll check, and sure enough that product has no attributes attached, when it did the day before....I know this, because I have actually loaded my own shop with over 100 digital products, and I know for a fact my attributes are written correctly, no spaces, no illegal characters, no bad files..so please don't tell me to check those...I already have and have fixed them three times in the last two weeks...anyway, as I said, you click on the A and there it is, attributes, none...and you go to the product itself in admin and the attribute lists are there, as in download 1, download 2, download, 3 etc..but all are blank..and in all the cases, the attribute boxes themselves have mulitpied to seven lines! Example, the designer has a tagger sized kit for sale, linked in her attributes as mjd_cute_kitty.zip so her product is assigned her designer name in her folder, she'll be say Missy Jo Designs so her attributes will be listed as missyjodesigns/mjd_cute_kitty.zip she'll then copy that product into the tagger category, where it shows under her designer name, the tagger scraps category, as well as any other relevant category her kit fits into, and it has one attribute...well three days later, that attribute goes missing, NONE...and when you edit her attributes to fix it, she'll have seven attributes, all blank of course...and the funny thing is, this will happen randomly to maybe every third product, and sometimes it skips a whole page of products on admin, and the next page with have every other one missing and it only happens to the scrap kits...not the commercial use templates or other products, only to the scrap kits. I have 45 designers in my shoppe....and twice this week we have already had to fix hundreds of attributes...and yet not one person here can tell me or any other store owner why this is happening and how to fix it! As I said, I am new to store owning, but not new to using zen, so I kow for a fact my own products are linked correctly, so why does this keep happening? All of my designers have ftp access and their own folders that their products go into, and then are copied from there to other categories that pertain to their product. And before you ask, all the files are still in the ftp, we don't all use filezilla, I use coreftp pro, this isn't happening to new products only, it is happening to old products as well, things that were uploaded two weeks ago, and things uploaded last night..all vanishing randomly. I'm trying to provide the basics asked for, as well as trying to fully explain the problem we're having, since it seems many have been having this isue, surely someone knows what is causing it and how to fix it. We have Zen Cart 1.3.8a
Patch: 1::
Database Patch Level: 1.3.8

We've not yet upgraded to the new version, it shows as available in our admin panel, no idea about add ons...our store manager handles all of that for zen, I've been through the faq section with a fine toothed comb, no answers, the store has bee online since April, and we just started having this problem 2 weeks ago.

[stevesh]

Well, looking at this logically, the first thing I notice, from these forums anyway, is that this problem is unique to digital scrapbooking stores.

I'm not clear from your post who exactly does what. Is this right?:

The designers upload their zip files to their own folder

You move those files to whatever folder is appropriate.

You create the product in admin, and add the download attribute.

Then, in some cases, that attribute disappears and there are 7 empty attribute entry lines in its place? Is it always exactly 7?

Does this happen to all designers more or less equally?

[NikkiAngel]

Ok, let me see if I can explain better...and before I do, I fixed all of my files last night, and today a customer made a purchase, and of course no download buttons, I go to check the product in my designer folder, hit the A, what do I get, Downloads: none. I clicked my attribute controller, went to edit my product, and there are six blank download sections, download 1, download2, etc, and the name of the zip that should be in the download section is gone. If you went ahead and clicked a new option name and option value, say download 1, it then proceeds to say that the attribute already exists, but it isn't showing anywhere...but if you edit it, you ahve to manually put the zip file name back into the box and update it, then it shows the attributes as there and green.

The designers each have their own ftp, their own log ins to the store, and their own folders to put their product into. Say designer A has her own log in, she logs in, clicks her own designer folder where she then adds all her products, descriptions, zips, everything, then once she has that done, she then goes to copy those files to the appropriate folders that match her product, say she has commercial use templates, so they will be in her main designer folder where she added them, then she'll go to copy, then multiple catebory link manager, and there she will proceed to click all corresponding boxes for her product before updating, that then puts her product in store in several categories at once.

This has been happening to scrap stores everywhere...and from what I can find out it only seems to be happening in newer stores, the older more established stores don't seem to have this happen. It doesn't happen to every product, it just seesm to hit random products in random folders....it was at first only happening to hybrid kits, or as some say taggers kits, which typically only have one zip file, now I see it is happening to full size kits which have multiple files. this is frustrating, no one seems to understand what is happening, doesn't have a clue what we mean when we say vanishing attributes, and no one knows how to fix it. We have a fairly straight forward scrap store, nothing fancy, we would just like to know why these attributes keep going into cyberspace, lol

It's happening all over my store, to all of my girls, and one guy, and none of them are too happy about going in every other day to fix their files. I'm pulling my hair out here, any clues? I'm up for suggestions, if you need my site, message me or email me, and I'll work with you on whatever it takes.

[Ajeh]

Do you have any of your own Products with attribute downloads?

If so, does it happen to you?

Do you have any add-ons for the attributes.php file?

If you review the admin_activity_log table and search on the page_access field for:
attributes_controller.php

And run the SQL:

SELECT * FROM admin_activity_log WHERE page_accessed LIKE '%attributes_controller.php%' AND page_parameters LIKE '%133%';

where 133 is the products_id of one of the Products where the download has gone missing ... are the admin_id values belonging to just the person(s) that should be working with that product?

[NikkiAngel]

Yes my products are also listed and it happens to mine as well, and the only admin ID attached to my products is mine that I can find. This happens to random products in random folders, and we keep having to go an re add the attributes and it is wreaking havoc on my store and designers.

[Ajeh]

Finally figured out what I think you are doing ...

If you have a Product with Attributes and Downloads on it and copy the Attributes to another Category then all of the matching attributes that are Downloads will be updated with NO Download file ...

So everything will be updated on the Attributes *except* the Download will now be blank ...

If I have Product A, Product B and Product C ... If Product A has a Download on it: abc123.zip ... why would I want to copy that to Category XYZ where Product B and Product C are and have those Products with the same Downloads?

[NikkiAngel]

But that is just the point those products are NOT in those other categories before copying them over! Can't you see what I mean? Ok, let me try this again...say designer A has uploaded a scrap kit to her designer folder, it is there in that folder and nowhere else..we have categories for the store, for example, we have taggers kits, perosnal use kits, birthdays, babies, scrap for hire, etc. the list goes on....she wants the kit she just added in her folder, to be visible in other folder/categories for the store...that way when a customer comes looking for something, they can simply click on the birthday category and there are all the kits that pertain to birthdays...not just the one designers, but all designers kits...if she didn't copy the kit to the other categories, then it would only be visible under her designer name in the store, and not every customer wants to look at just one designer but instead wants to look at all kits in one category to find one she likes...make sense now? One question i have is this, when copying the product tot he other categories, should we link the product or duplicate the product to the additonal categories? either way, it still seems as if no one understands what I mean by vanishing attributes, nor does anyone know how to fix this from happening....I've been told to disable designers salemaker permissons, but how would that stoo products form losing their attributes? They are still in the ftp, listed in the stores file manage rin cpanel, but they don't stick to the products!

[Ajeh]

Which are you doing now?

Do you want the Product in another Category as a NEW Product or the same Product in multiple categories?

If you Copy a Product to another Category as a Duplicate Product then the Product Download will not be copied ... as there is now 2 Products, the original with the Download and the Copy without the Download ...

If you Copy the Product to another Category as a Linked Product then the Product Download would be there as there is really only 1 Product ...

[NikkiAngel]

ARRGHH! I want to know why the attributes are vanishing. And right now it is set to copy the product to the other categories..so would duplicating the product be better?

This is what we have now:

Copy Method:
Link product (yes)
Duplicate product

Only used for Duplicate Products ...

Copy Product Attributes to Duplicate?
Yes
No


So now I'm wondering if this could be causing the attributes on the main product to vanish...if I'm reading correctly, you say that copying the product will copy the details, but not the zips attributes themselves....right? So that would mean to duplicate the whole product would carry the attributes as well? I wish you could see the store itself to see what I mean about the categories and linking products.

[Ajeh]

I will try to explain it again ...

If you have a Product with Attributes ... and those Attributes have Download filenames on them ...

If you Copy the Product to another Category as a Duplicate Product you will:

1 Have a NEW Product

2 The Product will NOT have the Attributes with DOWNLOAD filenames on them, they are not Copied in a Copy as a Duplicate Product

3 Each Copy as a Duplicate Product will produce a new Physical Product that is no longer related to the original Product in that a change to 1 Product will NOT reflect in the original Product


If you Copy the Product to another Category as a Linked Product you will:

1 Only have 1 Product

2 The 1 Product will be available from more than 1 Category

3 The Main Category know as the Master Category master_categories_id will "own" the Product but physically there is 1 Product

4 Each change of the Product that is Linked to another Category with result in the change being reflected on the Product in ALL Categories because there is physically 1 Product that is just "associated" with the different Categories that it was Linked to ...