Automatically delete products...

[Alex Clarke]

My suppliers provide me with 'discontinued items' xml feeds. While I have already intergrated a live stock status feed into my website, I would like to do the same for discontinued products.

So, I would like the discontinued products and their images to be automatically deleted.

I can easily extract the information from my suppliers xml file, but how would I delete the products (and their images) from my store database?

I understand that when you delete a product from the admin it's not the same end result as simply removing that product record from the database.

Can anyone advise me on this please? Thanks in advance. :)

[Rik]

Have used in the past easypopulate with v_status=9 in order to delete the product items. Not sure about the images

[DrByte]

I understand that when you delete a product from the admin it's not the same end result as simply removing that product record from the database.

Correct - there is a lot of other cleanup done, including unlinking from cross-linked categories, and more.
The code used to do deletes of non-customized-product-type products can be seen in /admin/includes/modules/delete_product_confirm.php

[Alex Clarke]

Have used in the past easypopulate with v_status=9 in order to delete the product items. Not sure about the images

I didn't know about that. Probably won't use it as DrByte has pointed me in the right direction again (see below). Thanks for replying anyway. :)

Correct - there is a lot of other cleanup done, including unlinking from cross-linked categories, and more.
The code used to do deletes of non-customized-product-type products can be seen in /admin/includes/modules/delete_product_confirm.php

Excellent, thanks for that. I'll have a look at the code tomorrow and see what I can come up with.

[Alex Clarke]

I've had a quick look at the code. Is it correct that I should only need to use the following?

    // remove product from all its categories:
    for ($k=0, $m=sizeof($product_categories); $k<$m; $k++) {
      $db->Execute("delete from " . TABLE_PRODUCTS_TO_CATEGORIES . "
                    where products_id = '" . (int)$product_id . "'
                    and categories_id = '" . (int)$product_categories[$k] . "'");
    }
    // confirm that product is no longer linked to any categories
    $count_categories = $db->Execute("select count(categories_id) as total
                                      from " . TABLE_PRODUCTS_TO_CATEGORIES . "
                                      where products_id = '" . (int)$product_id . "'");
    // echo 'count of category links for this product=' . $count_categories->fields['total'] . '<br />';

    // if not linked to any categories, do delete:
    if ($count_categories->fields['total'] == '0') {
      zen_remove_product($product_id, $delete_linked);
    }

[DrByte]

Without looking at the file again to confirm, I think that's about right.