Managing Postal charges and updating from Excel

[mR JoLLy]

There is a bit of a story before I get to the question so apologies for that !

 

I have taken some time to re-build the Prestashop database for countries and "States" to improve control of what people can enter. That's all working fine now and I have allocated my "zones" to each State and Country.

 

So far so good. Now it's Postal cost management and my plan to manage updates from Excel.

 

I am posting from the UK and have set up 4 zones. UK, EU, Non EU European (eg Switzerland), & BFPO. I then set up a spreadsheet to manage the database tables for carrier, carrier_group, carrier_lang, range_weight, and delivery. These have all been downloaded into a worksheet that has all the postal charges entered in an easy to update way. As I enter the new prices all the other workbooks are updated and it's a simple matter of copying the code into an sql script to update the databases.

 

This is where my question comes in because if you update carriers and prices from the Prestashop Admin pages I notice that the delivery table gets a completely new sequence of fields added to the table with an incremented ID for the carrier with the revised values. The value also gets amended in the "configuration" table to control the default carrier's ID if altered. This is all well and good, but I can't work out why Prestashop needs to increment the Carrier's ID all the time when alterations are made?? Can anyone explain why??

 

Everything is working spot on at the moment, but I wonder if I need to simulate this carrier ID increment in the delivery table etc or can I just update the table when needed and retain the same carrier ID.

 

All I can think is that it may have something to do with the history files on older sales to retrieve the postal costs charged at that time, but that is a wiled (and probably totally wrong, suggestion!

 

Any information would be gratefully received.

 

Nigel

[phrasespot]

All I can think is that it may have something to do with the history files on older sales to retrieve the postal costs charged at that time

Correct, if the record was modified instead of a new insert that would affect old orders (wrongly). The old entry is there but marked inactive. Sounds like you are pretty familiar with the inner workings, just setup your spreadsheets to mimic the behaviour.

[mR JoLLy]

Thanks for that confirmation, I'll see how to get that into the SS also.

 

I am only familiar with the inner workings because I have to manage the pricing very carefully so I had to work it all out!

 

When Royal Mail increase the prices it will only take an hour at most to update the lot. I am sure I will get the time spent doing this back in the future 4 carriers, 78 weight ranges, and 227 records in the delivery table tell you it has to be managed locally and uploaded!

 

Thanks once again

[Siete Euros]

Well, I need to know how to dump an excel table with all prices carrier, because I have a matrix of 115x20 and it getting me crazy prices. What are recorded file and directory data?. I have PS 1.3.2.3

[mR JoLLy]

I am away for the holidays at the moment and will explain what I have done when I get back. Not sure how different your version is to 1.4.6.2 I am working with!!

 

Back soon.