Help! Categories gone haywire!

PaulGN · March 11th, 2007, 06:16 PM

I have just finished setting up a new image database for my website. It involves a large number of categories, about 16000.

I have uploaded all the information for the categories to the database, unfortunately though there is a serious problem - although I can view the categories on the gallery page without any issues, when I attempt to view the categories in Admin - Edit Categories, they are not listing correctly, the names of the categories have disappeared etc. please see attached images for reference. I have also noticed that in the scan database option or if you attempt to upload an image from the gallery the categories are not listed properly in the drop down box - most of the entries are blank.

Any help would be appreciated, its taken some time to put this database together and I can't progress any further with it until this issue is resolved.

PaulGN · March 12th, 2007, 03:29 PM

OK, I've discovered what the problem is! Looking at the database entries in pp_categories for the cattype field, I noticed that they should be marked with the letter 'c' and a large number of them were blank! I ran an update query to fix the problem and voila! all the categories are appearing correctly!

Chuck S · March 12th, 2007, 05:34 PM

what would be a weird one never heard of the column not being set to c if you make the categories through our cats editor

PaulGN · March 12th, 2007, 06:51 PM

Chuck, I have another issue with the Categories and its with regard to uploading an image to a category. I have my database setup as follows:

For example the A category would be like the following:

A
-Star Wars
--Screenshots
--Artwork

So there is a main cat called A, and then a subcat with the name of the game, and then a screenshot and artwork cat. The problem is when I go to upload an image, the upload category drop down box, only lists A, B, C, D to Z. There is no Star Wars, screenshots or artwork ? I need to be able to upload images to the screenshots or artwork sub cats for each game etc.

How can I do this?

Chuck S · March 12th, 2007, 07:25 PM

How did you create these categories? Did you use the categories editor because something is not right here. There are too many issues here with your categories to be a coincidence.

You can view the top level categories through edit categories and hit the apply permissions to children to update permissions for your children cats but your issue is those fields are probally empty as well which brings me to ask how you did your cats. If you did this through some backend mysql and not our categories editor then your system is not going to work. Our scripts also create the data directory on disk when a mysql category insert is added to the database

PaulGN · March 18th, 2007, 10:23 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Chuck S

How did you create these categories? Did you use the categories editor because something is not right here. There are too many issues here with your categories to be a coincidence.

You can view the top level categories through edit categories and hit the apply permissions to children to update permissions for your children cats but your issue is those fields are probally empty as well which brings me to ask how you did your cats. If you did this through some backend mysql and not our categories editor then your system is not going to work. Our scripts also create the data directory on disk when a mysql category insert is added to the database

Sorry for not responding sooner, I've been away for a few days.

You are right about the 'mysql backend' route - that is how the data was setup - I use some custom software which generates the data for the photopost database, which sets up the categories etc. it also generates the necessary data directories as well. It has worked fine for previous photopost set ups. Problem this time, was that due to the huge number of categories required on this new database, I needed to modify my code to support this - unfortunately it appears I also messed up the 'permissions' and cattype code accidentally which has lead to all the problems! Thanks for pointing me in the right direction though, after reading your reply I checked out the permissions etc. and they were wrong so I was able to fix the issue. Everything is now working fine, and I am hoping to go live with the database later today.

I appreciate that you should not setup photopost in this way - and you should use the proper procedures! The reason I tend to do it this way especially on a huge database like this new one, is that it means I can setup my data in about 48 hours, very quickly and due to the limited amount of time I have for working on the website its a godsend. I just need to be more careful in the future!

Thanks again for your guidance.

Chuck S · March 18th, 2007, 03:36 PM

There in lies your issue. Whatever script or process you did has not followed the proper procedure to write categories to the database nor did it perform all the functions our script does when it creates a category so your entire issue is centered around how you did this. One of those lessons learned I guess