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Effect of changing the name or deleting a product or category item
Answer ID 1449   |   Last Review Date 11/09/2022

What happens if I change the name of a product or category?

Environment:

Products, Categories

Issue:

We are looking to change the name of a product or sub-product in the products menu (or similarly a category or sub-category in the Categories menu).  We have answers assigned to the product/category.

Resolution:

Re-naming a product or category is a straight forward function and will not affect answer/incident associations. However, if you choose to delete (and re-add) a product or category, this will affect all associations.The same can be said for Dispositions as well.

Renaming a value:
If you simply rename a product or category, by editing it and changing its Name value, your modifications will be updated throughout the incidents and answers in your site. When a value has been renamed, incidents and answers will retain their association to the value and will merely reflect the updated name.

 

Deleting a value and re-adding it:
If you delete a product or category, all answer and incident associations are broken and the incidents and answers will be assigned to the unassigned, unspecified value.

You cannot delete a product if there are any answers still associated with that product. 

Adding the product or category back into the table with the same name does not re-associate the incidents and answers to that value. The associations between the incidents and answers and the product or category would need to be re-established.

You can mass edit incidents to reassociate them to a product or category value. You can also mass edit answers to edit the product and category values.

For more information regarding editing multiple records, refer to Answer ID 1894: Editing multiple records at the same time.

There is no dependency check against rules when deleting a product or category.  If you have deleted a product or category and a rule condition is checking for a deleted product or category this may lead to an error in rules.  Please read Rulebase compile error: Database Referential Integrity Error to learn how to resolve the error.