Theatre seating, one seat per night inventory

Setting up a shop for a theatre nonprofit where tracking one seat for sale each show night has become a BIG job. This is primarily due to ZenCart's inability to maintain an inventory count by multiple attributes.

My way around this is to have the show as the main category, with the show dates as subcategories under that. The products are each seat for each show, which means there are a lot of products.

This also makes a long product list to find a seat number way at the end. Yeah, they could filter with the dropdown sorter, but that too is a lot of digging to buy what they want.

To make it easy for the customer, I'm using a seating chart picture made in Fireworks with hyperlinks (in javascript) to that seat's product for that night.

All of it works pretty slick, but it's really tedious, copying 100-120 seats for 72 shows in the year (= 8,640 products). It'd be nice if I could copy the full category, subcategories, and products all at once.

This would be easy in a database handler and that is MySQL. I'm wondering if I can just take the database, work with it on my computer, and put it back on the server for ZenCart??? Does anyone else do this?

Here's a link to the site, not done yet, just the first four nights are set up:

https://www.theatrikos.com/ZenCart/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=18_29

Toni

estertester:

This is primarily due to ZenCart's inability to maintain an inventory count by multiple attributes.

There's this:

** http://www.zen-cart.com/index.php?main_page=product_contrib_info&products_id=310**

I don't know if it will apply to your situation, though.

I read forum posts and it seems many have had problems with the add-on module working. I didn't want to risk a lot of effort into a non-functioning system.

My idea was to get direct access to the MySQL database and make changes there. My choice was to import it into Excel which I know best and can copy and make edits to the individual seats so I could produce the 8,000-some products quicker than through the admin control panel which took several hours to copy and edit only one night's show (36 shows in a year).

Here's how ya do it . . . import MySQL data tables into Excel, and the opposite, Export the newly revised data from Excel into MySQL.

Of course before making any changes to the database you'll want to back it up first.

A Visual Guide to Importing and Exporting Data Between Microsoft Excel and MySQL (you'll have to register with MySQL to receive the report, 15 page PDF, by email)
http://mysql.com/why-mysql/white-papers/mysql_wp_excel_guide.php

As the above report explains, you'll also need to download MySQL to make the connection. It gives the link to what you'll need.