PAM (RMS) Leaves Previous CategoryID After Changing to Department Without Categories

Client Software
1

Hi guys,

So I am losing products on my site after overhauling our Departments and Categories. I couldn’t figure out why our ‘Earbuds’ department has 2 items in it (which the BETA navigation detects), but when I view the ‘Earbuds’ category page, there are no items listed.

So I checked our SQL database, and noticed that the new ‘DepartmentID’ took hold, but PAM did not update the ‘CategoryID’ to ‘0’ when the new department was assigned. It should have set ‘CategoryID’ to ‘0’ because there are no categories in the new “Earbuds” department.

So, in short- if a product previously had a ‘Department’ and ‘Category’ assigned, then you assign a new ‘Department’ to the product that has no child categories; PAM retains the old ‘CategoryID’, thus the products are not listed appropriately on your site.

A temporary solution is to assign ‘0’ to CategoryID via SQL queries manually (one product at a time). There does not seem to be a way to remedy this via PAM.

2

Hi Derek,

Do you use Web Navigation? If so you can see Web Category ID and Web Department ID as columns in PAM and they are fully editable.

3

Very cool. I will have a look there. I ended up just using a conditional SQL query to “reset” these subcategories. Even so, the IDs should be reset in the event of a Department change. Perhaps this could be brought to the developer’s attention and implemented in a future PAM update?

Thank you again for the information!

4

Hi Derek

More recent versions of PAM reset the category (regardless of whether you’re using Web or Native navigation) when you change the department so upgrading should solve the issue. See Please Sign In - WebSell Portal for more information.

Regards
Jerry

5

Outstanding. Thank you for fixing that! That will help us a ton in the future!