I think that when you delete a product from inventory and a customer who has purchased that item in the past goes into thier Order History and tries to copy that order to the shopping cart, it creates a "object reference" error -- and from that point on the customer cannot even get to the shopping cart page unless they clear their cache and/or cookies in their browser.


Even logging out and loggin in as a new customer creates the problem because the items are still in the cart. I think Mitch brought this issue up before, that items in the cart need to go with the customer and not with the "session"

Personally, I think the problem moreso lies in the fact that Bv even allows a true delete function to occur. I am personally of the school of thought that believes nothing in a database should ever be deleted especially relational databases because it is almost impossible to prevent these types of errors from occuring. The "delete" function should simply set a product as permanently deactivated in my opinion and the "Delete order" function should be changed to a "Cancel order".

We have considered this change in the past, and the issue here lies with the fact that some stores have a huge turnover in products and this would create tons of wasted space in the db, which of course would affect performance. Some users with very large catalogs already have issues with this. We currently store product name, sku, etc... on line items in order to alleviate this problem from certain aspects, but it does appears that there are cases where this is causing an issue, particularly in carts. We will attempt to address this issue in the future.

The carts going with users issue is also another issue that some store owners feel one way and other store owners feel another way. We added this in Bvc5 (it used to be the other way in 2004) because store owners wanted a user to be able to create a cart with a bunch of products, then login, and not destroy or reset their cart. Another reason we did this is because in bvc5 we have anonymous checkouts and in this case a cart doesn't have a user.

Hi Justin,

One thing you may want to consider is having an archive product table or 2. Every so often when a product has been deleted, the product is removed from the main product table to the archive table. You can use sql 2005's native xml type to create typed schemas for your simple relational table like product choices, etc. Then in the InternalProduct class you can add a check that when/if a particular product is requested if it is not found during the standard query of the main product table it performs another search on the archive table to retrieve the data that is needed. You now keep the performance benefits as your main table size is reduced, but still retain all of the data in database for later use when needed.