weird issue with master category in product page

[willie bee]

Well I have some items I copied and linked, etc. etc. etc yadda yadda.

See attached. I noticed that some of my product, the master category is not changeable.

Here's the kicker . on some of them, you can't search for, some of them you can. Meaning you can type in the part number the front or back end and some will show, and some will not. On the ones that do not show I have to take those products and copy them to another category and then go into the copied link product and change the master category to that. Then delete the f'd up on and then move the product back to the correct category.

whew .

is there a way to fix this since I cannot go through all these to find out which ones are searchable and which arent'?

[Ajeh]

That means a Master Category was not set ...

Click the C for copy and click the Master Categories Link Manager ... check the Category Dropdown do you see a valid Category in there? If so, set the Master Category to that by just selecting it in the dropdown ...

[willie bee]

Here is the weird part. Its doing it for new products now. When I go back to edit the new product, same deal.

[willie bee]

Ok Im working too hard. On items that are not linked, there should be no drop down for the master cat in the product page, just only linked items?

[Ajeh]

The Products should always say the Master Categories ID but the Linked Products will show a dropdown with the actual Master Categories ID selected ...

They should never read ID #0 ... that would indicate that the Master Categories ID is set to 0 or nothing ...

[willie bee]

It's called working late and brain farting.

Anyways, is there a script I can run or do a search in MySql to see which products have invalid master IDs?

[Ajeh]

Do you import products?

Do you use Linked Products?

[willie bee]

We have linked products like you wouldn't believe. We do no import products. They are entered the old fashioned way.

[Ajeh]

You can try backing up your database and then going to the Tools ... Store Manager ... and use the:
Update Master Categories

Then the run the:
Update ALL Products Price Sorter

But if you have a lot of Products, you may want to look at post #29 of this thread:
http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?t=188207

What that is designed to do is grab the first record of the products_to_categories table in the order that the Products were added to use that as the Master Categories ID which may be more efficient on a site using Linked Products ...

How many Products do you have and how many Categories with Products do you have?

[willie bee]

15K products and about 40 categories.