VbzCart/docs/pieces/catalog/building/2017

Revision Notes

We now calculate stock availability in real-time, so we do not need to calculate that when building the catalog. What we do need is a per-Item (Template:Vbzcart/table) flag to indicate whether the item is available from the Supplier or not, based on catalog status.

Apparently this change was done last year: we now have the isAvail flag.

Process

stage 1

Action: Build a list (currently a recordset) of all supplier-items known to be available, based on combining active catalog(s). Match the list up against the Template:Vbzcart/table table and build an action list containing each generated item: either new (to be added) or found (to be updated). Show links to matching items so user can verify the match, and allow the user to check off which actions to take.

Building the list itself is pretty straightforward.

There isn't a rigorous way of matching this list up with our existing Items table because (of course) suppliers neither use our unique Item IDs nor do they supply their own. What they do have is catalog numbers, which tend to be persistently attached to a particular item -- but sometimes the item changes in ways that we want to keep track of (e.g. the shirt originally had lyrics over the basic design, but now it doesn't; or, the background color has changed) and sometimes a disused catalog number is reused for a new item.

So we use the catalog number as the basis for correlating the two lists, but it needs to be hand-checked. At present, we only check for title-string changes; ideally there should also be an image cross-check.

(documentation in progress)