Mystery - Products being disabled??

[rwoody]

No this is a live customer site. It has its own db, not shared and no other apps running. It's just too weird.

I was working with her trying to create a reference list for myself on what was "on" and what was "off" she is the manufacturer so she can control her stock. If something is no longer available, she turns the product off until it is available again. A good example are seasonal products. We never had this issue at all until I upgraded her to 1.3.7. Prior to that all was good.

We had a lot of products cross linked into two different directories. I spent the afternoon removing all the links and verifying that the master ids were in fact correct. Two products were disabled in another directory right while I was working. I knew there were 90 enabled products and when I looked there were 88.

I'm going to optimize the db and making sure all is set perfect again and then check again in the am and see what we have.

[rwoody]

Things seem to be stablizing. This is what I “think” was happening but still to be proved out over the day. This is what I wrote to my customer - thought I would post this for others.

"The system is very complex with a lot of code and instructions in the background telling it what to do. But just like anything else if we start to give it too much conflicting information, it can start to fail. Even though in “theory” this is possible, I don’t think the system really handles certain situations as well as we would like.

We had Seasonal candles as a category “turned off”, but we had selected items within that category linked and turned on in regular candles. Plus I have the scent filter working in the background. So …. It’s saying this item is turned off here, but on here – I think it just started to give the db a stroke…LOL

Now that doesn’t mean we can’t link products. But I think in the future, if we decide to re-link the seasonal products to the main, we should only link those that are going to be on or off per season. If a candle to be on all year round, the we will move it to the main and just during the season, link it to the seasonal candles while that category is “on”. When we turn it off, kill the link first. This is where custom coding can start to effect core code that we can’t see and as there are millions of lines of code, nearly impossible to know all the ramifications of our changes."

Now how that might be relevent to others here, is that I often see posts about hidden categories and can a category be turned off, but a product turned on - It is theoretically possible to do that, but be aware that too much conflicting information can start to create problems. I am a testiment to it. That is especially true if you have a lot of custom code and or modifications to the system. Custom features are great, we all love them, but sometimes there is a big price to pay. I always warn my customers... yes, it might be possible, but...problems in the future may arise that we just can't predict... thus my system randomly deciding to turn products on and off at a whim.

I will post one last report on this post at the end of today or tomorrow as to whether this was in fact the solution, but all has now been stable for the last two hours with no grimlins...