Problems with Sort by Price

I don't see a way to sort your Products by Price ...

You appear to be using some kind of Add On that has taken away that feature ...

If I go to the New Products, and sort the Products in reverse order, they appear correct but I did not go through the whole list ...

What specifically is not sorting by Price right now? How are you altering the Sort Order where this is not working? :unsure:

Linda,

As they were not working, I removed the options for sort by price.
I did not want to present the customers with something that did not
work.

I will make those sort options available for you so look at them.

They should be available at around 2PM ET on 24OCT.

John

Linda,

The sort by price, low to high and high to low, are now available.

Yes, the sort seems to work correctly for new product. Also,
the sort by price also works for the Emergency Stamps category.

I really do appreciate your looking at this.

I downloaded code from the live site to my localhost and the
sort works on the localhost. Sure looks like a DB problem but then
one would think that the New Products sort by price would not work
correctly if it were a DB problem. I guess I am still an EGG !

John

Linda,

I am seeing a pattern in the categories that sort properly and
those that do not. I believe that the problem may be related to
a recent upload I performed using EasyPopulate.

I believe that in the last upload there was some kind of problem
and there was a message for each of the products that the data
was not stored because the v_product_model was missing.
The tab delimited file looked fine but there was apparently
something not correct. I re-created the tab delimited text file
and reloaded the data and everything seemed to work.
HOWEVER, when I looked at the Categories and Products, in
admin, there were about 80 new Categories. Those categories all
had names that were the same as the v_products_image.

I deleted all of those new categories, as they had no products in them, but now I am beginning to wonder if that is were the problem
originated.

The categories that seem to sort correctly have NOT had any
new products uploaded recently. Those that do not sort
properly had product uploaded in that last upload.

I think we are getting somewhere.

So, here is the next question. The backups I have on the
server are FULL backups. I know that I can have the
support folks do a complete restore of a backup. However,
I would like to just do a restore of the database. Do you
suppose that they can extract just the DB files from the full
backup and restore just the DB?

John

Linda,

I just had another thought, and I hope it is a good one ( I sure
need a good one right now ).

Let's assume that there is something messed up in the DB and
further assume that it is related to the Products table and
the Products to Categories table.

What if I were to go into the admin and delete all of the
categories? As I have a tab delimited download of the DB
I could then reload all of the product back into the DB. Would
that likely take care of the problem?

By the way, the site seems to be down, or REALLY SLOW, right now.

John

Linda,

I just had an even better idea, I hope.

As soon as I can access the site I am going to delete just one of
the categories that is not sorting properly. I will then reload the
product data for that category and see if it sorts properly. If it
does, then I can proceed with the plan to remove and reload all
the product data.

Does that sound like a good plan?

John

Linda,

Well, my last idea did not work. I removed the FDC and MC
big packs category and then reloaded it. The sort by price
still does not work. HMMM !

Is there a different sort routine used when looking at products by
category than the routine used for new products ?

John

Each of the Listings has its own setting for the default Sort Order ...

Check the setting on the Configuration ... Product Listing ...

Display Product Listing Default Sort Order
Product Listing Default sort order?
NOTE: Leave Blank for Product Sort Order. Sort the Product Listing in the order you wish for the default display to start in to get the sort order setting. Example: 2a

NOTE: When Products are imported, often times the master_categories_id and products_sort_order fields in the products table are not filled with the correct information ... after you reloaded your Products ... did you go to the Tools ... Store Manager ... and run the:

Reset ALL Products Master Categories ID
to be used for Linked Products and Pricing: Reset

and then run the:

Update ALL Products Price Sorter
to be able to sort by displayed prices: Update

NOTE: if you use Linked Products you may need to go to some Categories and reset the master_categories_id for the Category ... this is under the C for Copy button of a Category on the Multiple Categories Linked Manager ... at the bottom of the screen are methods to Reset all Products in a Category to use that categories_id as its master_categories_id ...

Linda,

Thanks. I have done all of those things and verified in the
database that the products all have the correct values in the
products_price_sorter and master_categories_id fields in the
products table. I have also verified that the
products_to_categories table appears to be correct.

I have run the CHECK TABLE function, in MySql, and the tables
all appear to be okay.

At this point, I am just going to remove the sort by price options
so the customers don't even see it. I will continue to work on the
issue on my offline server and see if I can figure it out. When I
find the problem I will let you know.

Thanks for you help.

John

If you choose to look further into this, I would be interested in seeing your Zen Cart Admin and see if something is being missed here that is resulting in this issue ...

You may PM me if you want me to look at this further ...

Linda,

Thanks for the offer. For right now I want to keep working on the
issue to see if I can figure it out. I might actually learn something.

Since my last post I have gone through all of the admin configuration
and catalog settings and compared them to the settings on my local server. They all appear to be the same. As I posted earlier, the
sort by price works on my local server.

So, it would appear that there is either a difference in the software,
which I think is unlikely but possible, or the database is corrupt.

I did notice that the version of MySql running on my local server is
5.0.24A and on the hosting service it is 5.0.91-community.
I doubt that is an issue, and I don't think the hosting service
has made any changes, but thought I would present that to you
anyway.

If I get really frustrated with this I will take you up on your
offer. For the moment we will continue to run the site without
the price sorting feature enabled.

I may see if I can find a MySql expert that can look at the DB
to determine what problems there might be.

Thanks for your help.

Linda,

YAAAAAYYYYY ! I found the problem and it WAS in the Admin.

I compared all the settings in my localhost setup versus the
live site setup and finally found the setting that was incorrect.
It was in the Product Listing table, the Display Product Model field.

I don't know how, when, or why I might have changed that setting
but when I made it the same as in my localhost settings (which
I presume were the default settings as I just recently installed
the site there), the sort by price started working.

Thanks for ALL your help. I really appreciate the time and effort
you spent.

Regards,
JohnBoyCr

Thanks for the update that you found the missing setting and got everything working correctly ... :smile: