HikaShop Business v1.5.8 and MaxiMenu CK v6.0.14

I’m having issues getting MaxiMenu CK configured properly with HikaShop Business 1.5.8 (screen goes blank entering config).

I have spoken to the author of MaxiMenuCK and he has only tested it on “Starter”.

Has anyone else had a problem with the "Business" version of HikaShop?

Thanks Nicolas.

I switched logging to Maximum as you recommended. There are no entries in the log file regarding MaxiMenu, only a few about RokSprocket that seem to have been occurring long before MaxiMenu was installed anyway.

I put logging onto “Developer” to see if that would help. I saw some messages on the screen but nothing obviously related to MaxiMenu.

Hi Nicolas,

I was looking around for more log files and I found one under “/administrator”.

In there I found numerous entries stating:

[23-Aug-2012 02:33:56 UTC] PHP Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 67108864 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 8192 bytes) in /home/evolutio/public_html/ssdev/modules/mod_maximenuck/helper_hikashop.php on line 109

Line 109 in that module seems to be part of a loop that loads categories and sub-categories and sub-sub-categories and sub-sub-sub-categories.

Further to my posting recently about poor performance with the category explorer:
www.hikashop.com/en/forum/2-general-talk...xplorer-timeout.html

I have looked into the categories table and found some categories that are 53 levels deep. This is much deeper than the categories that I have imported, I assure you, and 53 levels do not show on the Explorer. I think that these two issues are related and that there are too many levels for the MaxiMenu code to handle and it’s run out of memory.

How that number of levels managed to be created remains a mystery.

Nicolas,

I think you missed my point. I did not design 53 levels of categories, at most there are probably 6 levels. A number of the categories do not appear on the menu, the rest are for navigating via brand and appear in one of your content modules as a category listing is a sidebar.

Structure 1 – Menu: <Product category>\Types\Footwear\Men’s\Running

Structure 2 – Sidebar: <Product category>\Brand\Brand A\Footwear\Men’s\Running

How do some records in the database end up with 53 levels?

Here is an example with 25 levels from the database table:

Boy's(6244)\Tennis(6248)\Footwear(6314)\Boy's(6362)\Tennis(6366)\Footwear(6432)\Boy's(6480)\Tennis(6484)\Footwear(6550)\Boy's(6598)\Tennis(6602)\Footwear(6668)\Boy's(6716)\Tennis(6720)\Footwear(6786)\Boy's(6834)\Tennis(6838)\Footwear(6904)\Boy's(6952)\Tennis(6956)\Footwear(7022)\Boy's(7070)\Tennis(7074)\Balls(7141)\Rugby League(7159)\ [25]

Hi Nicolas,

I agree, the 53 levels did not get there by themselves, that is why I am investigating and trying to resolve this.

At the moment, the categories that exist are a requirement of my client and were specified by them as how they wanted their eCommerce web site to operate. At most, they have defined 3-4 levels (there are also 2 internal system levels). At this point in time, I am still trying to satisfy my client’s requirements. If it turns out that we cannot support my client’s requirements, then at that point I ask my client to change their requirements.

I have already tried deleting and reimporting the categories. It fixed the Category Explorer time-out problem, but not the MaxiMenu problem.

The categories were imported via the standard HikaShop CSV product import process. I can think of 3 possible areas where things may be going wrong:

Possibility 1 – The category structure was modelled in Excel by my client and the uploaded CSV was created using a VBA macro that I wrote to converted that model into the format that your import process requires. Perhaps my VBA code has an error.

Possibility 2 – The category names frequently have the same character string within them, for example: “\Footwear\Men’s\Running” “\Nike\Men’s\Running”. “Running” is repeated for “Men’s”, “Women’s”, “Girl’s” “Boy’s” and all of the brands. Perhaps the import process is confused by these repeating names. To test this I intend to create a CSV for import that has a unique suffix for each parent/child combination, for example “\Footwear-01\Men’s-02\Running-03”, “\Footwear-01\Men’s-02\Walking-04”, “\Nike-10\Men’s-11\Running-12”. If this works, I can export the table from mySQL, remove the suffixes and then reimport.

Possibility 3 – I import my categories in 2 batches. Once for “Types” categories and once for “Brands” categories. I’m going to try these imports one at a time and look at the result within the database. I will also try to combine these two CSVs into one and import all at once to see the results.

And the winner is “Possibility 3”.

I tested importing my “Types” and “Brands” categories individually into an empty system. Both imports, by themselves, produced depths of 5 and 6 respectively. This is as expected. If, however, I import one after the other without deleting the previous batch, the issue arises and a depth of 53 occurs.

If I combine both CSV files into a single CSV and then upload in one batch, I end up with a maximum depth of 6. This is as expected. The issue appears to be with the way HikaShop processed the two phase upload.

It should be noted, that even with the single monolithic upload of categories, there were still 11 categories created whos’ parent IDs are invalid.

So, back to the matter at hand, MaxiMenu.

The MaxiMenu configuration screen still fails to load and there is still an error log entry regarding running out of memory. My conclusion is that I have too many categories for MaxiMenu to handle.

My options to resolve this are:

1) Ask MaxiMenu to allow for more categories, or permit the pre-fetch of a sub-set of categories for configuration purposes. IE, instead of starting at the root category and reading all sub-categories thereunder, start at “Types” and then read the sub-categories from there. This is between me and MaxiMenu to work out.

2) Ask my client to re-evaluate their category structure requirements.

Many thanks for your help Nicolas. I understand that this has been frustrating for all involved.

Nicolas,

In the attached zip file are the three files that we used to upload categories into HikaShop. I have anonymised the brand names to protect my customer’s interests because this is effectively a public forum, but all other information is unaltered.

Categories-Types.csv
Categories-Brands.csv
Categories-Merged.csv

When I upload Types & Brands separately, I get the issue with 53 levels. When I upload the “Merged” file, it seems to go fine, but still with a few categories with invalid parent IDs.

Hi Nicolas,

Thanks for confirming that, I though it must have been something like that.

For the individual files, you’ll notice on line 2 (line 1 of data), the “parent_category” field is blank. I would have thought that this would have acted as an anchoring point for the following imported lines meaning that all of the new categories grew from this new branch of the category structure and did not relate to any other existing branches.

On the bright side, a review of the category structure with my client is looking good and early indications are that we should be able to remove at least 90% of the categories.

Also, sorry for the delayed response, I have been out of the office for 2 weeks.