No Products To Display 1.5.1

[bumba000]

Hello All,
Running a 1.5.1 here (yes still). Had an issue a while back that has just happened again. I have a category (lets call it 500) with sub categories. I move all product from the sub's up into the main category 500 and delete all now empty sub categories. In the admin all is well, but on the front end I get the "no products to display" message.

In the database all products have 500 as their master category. In products to categories all products have just the one link to the expected 500 category. They just aren't showing up on the front end. If I search for the model of a specific product I get it in search results and can view it. The bread crumb points to the expected 500 category. I click the bread crumb and it says no products.

Please.....

Thank you,
John

[bumba000]

well it must be a cache issue. I turned the category off as well as all products contained within. Cut half of my lawn came back and turned the category and all products within back on. Now it's working both on the front end and in the admin...

[Website Rob]

Don't you love it when the web elves do their thing.

[mc12345678]

Would suggest "for peace of mind" to look at the parent_id of categories to see which if any point to 500.

The problem described is equivalent to product and category both being in a category. So yes the check(s) were performed to validate that the product is expected to appear in a given category, but there may also be a category that expects to be in the same category and that can throw things off.

[bumba000]

There was never a parent to cat id 500, but there were sub cats within 500. It was
500
> 550 > products
> 560 > products

it's now
500 > products

with no sub categories.

Thank you,
John

[mc12345678]

Would suggest "for peace of mind" to look at the parent_id of categories to see which if any point to 500.

The problem described is equivalent to product and category both being in a category. So yes the check(s) were performed to validate that the product is expected to appear in a given category, but there may also be a category that expects to be in the same category and that can throw things off.

There was never a parent to cat id 500, but there were sub cats within 500. It was
500
> 550 > products
> 560 > products

it's now
500 > products

with no sub categories.

Thank you,
John

Although the question was misunderstood, part of the answer was provided. Categories 550 and 560 were known to have had a parent_id of 500. Categories 550 and 560 were removed but it is not known if there are/were other categories in the database that also pointed to category 500 but for some other reason do not display in the admin. From the above description of action taken before and after yard work, the disabling of the category and product would have disabled any of the categories that presumably no longer had product/were not presented in the admin. Then when turning back on category 500 and all of its subproduct, would have maintained that/those categories disabled. Thus in the end, category 500 would only appear to have product not product and category. Please understand that I am only going off of what was described as being performed, the result seen, and understanding/experience in seeing that result. Don't know *exactly* how a sub-category could have been associated with category 500 and not been displayed, but there are a number of "internal" checks/comparisons performed to generally prevent display of odd orphans, though there are other ways that they can be discovered (accidentally sometimes) and others yet to ferret them out.

A little database inspection such as from phpMyAdmin with the below SQL query would answer the question I asked before of what categories might still exist in the database with a parent_id of 500 (or in reverse, what categories are still in the database that are children of category 500):

SELECT * FROM categories WHERE parent_id = 500;

(Be sure to prefix 'categories' with your DB_PREFIX as found in includes/configure.php if it is other than '')

If there is other than a null/empty/no records response, then it is possible that the table categories_description has had that category_id removed, but the categories table has not. The result of that is if a query is performed to join the categories and categories_description tables on a 'one-for-one' basis (language options can have an effect in this), then a missing categories_description record for a categories record in a particular language would be as if no record at all is returned, even though the categories table still has a record.