Quote Originally Posted by CharlesGreenly46 View Post
Thank you! I posted in a forum that stopped talking about EP back in 2011 I think so I edited and removed it and posted it here, apologies if I did something wrong - won't happen again.

We have a couple of different sites and the datasets are the same. When they drop the products they drop the products from the csv or api or xml - which is driving me crazy. Trying to turn those off using standard EP scripts (heavily modified to handle 30,000 products) still leaves the dangling discontinued files. Thanks for the insight, may have to write a separate mysql or php routine to do just what you said. Oh, the joys of ecommerce :)
No problem, and technically this thread is just a single spin off of the main thread for EP4.

Really suggest talking with that supplier. The file does no good really other than could completely remove the product from that supplier and then put it all back, but problem is that generally speaking restoration of the product would result in a new products_id and therefore the "internet" would see it as a completely new product each and every day. Now version 4.0.33 and above of EP4 does permit populating the database by products_id, so one could destroy and recreate if the products_id can be carried over from one day to the next/before deleting the old...

Whatever the case, want to minimize the need for any daily ineraction with the site as part of this process...

I was kind of thinking of a single variable array where the key in the array is possibly the product identifier, and then as part of the sql query, loop through and when query returns an identifier not in the array,take action (don't know if this is a no-longer carrying condition or a "oops" we're out of stock at the moment condition.