Associate all products with parent category when deleting a category

[gingerling]

We are simplifying our store and have found removing subcategories hard work. If we have

Recycling > Recycled > Products Recycling > Recyclable > Products

And we want to just have

Recycling > Products

It doesn't seem easy to do. The three options given after you ask to delete a category involve only products which are not associated with other categories. All our products are in multiple categories.

From what I can see there is not way to simply "associate all products with parent category, regardless of other category associations"

To me that seems like the most sensible option anyway, unless I am misunderstanding something.

[ghost]

I also have this problem so I hope there's a good solution for it. None of the current choices make sense for me either.

[gingerling]

From what I can see the only way at all to move products up to a parent category if they have more than one category association is manually, one my one. I can't be done in bulk from the product menu either. It's crazy :(

[ghost]

Totally agree. There's another annoyance when trying to change product categories. Every time I've tried to do this I get a lot of "product out of stock" emails.

[gingerling]

Ok, I found a nasty hacky way

1) edit the parent category of the categories you want to delete 2) Click "display products from sub-categories" 3) then disable the subcategories on the "displayed" column

The effect of this is to hide the sub categories from the menu but make all their products visible

Anyone care to test?

[ghost]

I don't want to test that. :). I hope there's another way. I'd wait to see what others come up with. Have you asked in the forum?

[gingerling]

No, don't feel the need, it's clearly a bug.

The nasty hacky way works well so far though.

[ghost]

Ok!

[Traumflug]

Maybe Selenium IDE can help? It's a browser extension which can record and replay click and typing sequences.

A more general solution could be to allow editing multiple products simultaneously. Same dialogs as when editing a single product, but changes (only changes!) apply to all selected products. Not simple ti implement, of course, but I'd see a worthwhile goal for 30bz 1.1.x there.

[ghost]

A worthwhile goal to add to the list of goals. This is very hard work and I’m not a developer. Kudos to @Traumflug and for Anna bringing it to our attention.

[mkerd]

Well this is not a bug and what's suggested on https://github.com/thirtybees/thirtybees/issues/351#issuecomment-326534700 is not a solution since the products still belong to the categories to be deleted. From my POV this is just how the system behaves.

So for the topic that's the core of this issue, we can do two things:

1. Change the way the category deletion behaves
2. Do nothing and try to overcome this with the improvement that was mentioned on https://github.com/thirtybees/thirtybees/issues/351#issuecomment-326552563

@gingerling Since it was a long time ago, did you face with this problem again and approached differently you mentioned in here?

[gingerling]

Hi, we haven't had the issue again. I don't think selenium is a reasonable option, I have tried to use it before and it's hard for less technical people. I don't think i ever resolved this issue actually, I just left it as it was. In my case the reason for the task was about navigation and SEO, not back of office catalogue structure - so the other method worked but isn't ideal.

I'm not sure why the system behaves this way - it seems to be the kind of bare minimum of feature if it's not a bug. I guess it stops you losing products from the front of store, but that's about it. I would expect to be able to remove parent categories like in WordPress etc.

Hope that helps - sorry for slow reply, I have health stuff x