Inactive inventory group sub-items spontaneously re-activating
Hi, I've had a couple of instances recently where inactive sub-items in a group inventory list have become active again, causing a bit of confusion.
I used to list all different colours of our house t-shirt as separate sub-items for our inventory, but now I've combined these to a single item for simplicity and made the individual colours inactive. When just re-stocking the t-shirts I noticed that the inactive sub-items had become active again without anyone else touching the system (and that some "inactive" items had been sold at POS). It's possible that this happened when I changed the name of the parent item, though I can't be 100% sure of this. Not a big deal but has caught me out a couple of times recently.
Comments
Hmmm... I can't say I've heard of this issue before... but also I can't say I know of a situation where someone turned a group product into an individual product.. although I'm sure you are not the first.
If you can isolate it to any particular change to the parent item moving forward it would be helpful.
Thanks
Hi Andy, I've just had this issue crop up again - inactive sub-items of a parent group inventory item just spontaneously re-activated. This time I'm sure it was caused by me adding a new tax code to the parent item (they had previously not had a tax code attached). This appears to have caused inactive sub-times (e.g. colours of shorts which we no longer sold) to be re-activated. Does that help isolate the issue? Unfortunately I applied this new tax code to my whole product database, so I think every inactive sub-item in my database has reactivated! Would be great to stop this happening in the future. Let me know if you need any more details. Thanks.
I just added a tax code to a parent product with inactive subproducts and could not replicate what you are describing.
Is there anything else unusual about these particular products?
Hi Andy
Hmm, I'll give you a run down of the particular product which was affected (though this happened for several different products). It was:
Inventory Group
Shorts (with vendor details attached)
Sub-items the same price
Display Category: shop
Account: [same as display]
Sub-Account: Clothing
Sales Tax: Originally none specified - changed to a zero % "hint" rate when the problem occurred.
The inactive sub-items had different values in the size and colour fields (e.g. M, Black)
I could send a screenshot if that would help, though don't think I can do that through this forum?
The other affected products were generally similar - e.g. an old climbing shoe style which we only had 2 sizes remaining of, where the unavailable sizes had been made inactive.
Let me know if I can help further. James
I looked at this further and actually can repeat it.
This is by design, though the behavior isn't ideal. When you modify a "parent" product, it copies all the properties to the children products to avoid the manual effort of requiring you to update each child product individually.
This is useful.... except in the case you've identified where a child product is inactive and the parent product is still active since it then re-activates the child product.
In the next update I've made the change that it will only propagate an INACTIVE state from the parent-to-child. It will not propagate an ACTIVE state. This will solve the problem you are experiencing, but, if you ever want to activate all a bunch of inactive children products again... you'll need to manually activate each one.
Essentially, implementing either behavior will have a side-effect (propagate or not propagate the inactive status)... but it makes the most sense to propagate an INACTIVE status from parent-to-child, but not an active status. The most typical situation is an active parent with a few children products inactive... and the change will work for that.
Hi Andy - that sounds good, I saw that the new update will implement this change. Thanks for looking into it. James
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