Prevent Product Duplicates

lucian · September 20th, 2003, 06:22 AM

How can I prevent a product duplicatting.

I have a page CatType.asp that submit to itself and shows at the bottom a list of products based on the CatID.
Is kind of tree view but it shows at the bottom instead under that category.

The thing is, some products are repeating because they are in the database under different cat types.

Is there any way of filtering the product <%if found do not duplicate%>?

Do you also know anywhere an function example to actually display the product under the category that belongs to - expand collapse type- as in this forum.

Imar · September 20th, 2003, 02:08 PM

Hi there,

It depends a little on why you have the duplicates, and where you want to hide / filter them.

For example, you can use the keyword DISTINCT in an SQL query so it just returns unique records. This is a clean and quick way as it will just return the relevant records from the database, instead of passing them all.

Alternatively, you can use some loop code in ASP to accomplish this. To make this work, you duplicate records should come after each other in the recordset, so make sure you use a good ORDER BY clause to sort them correctly.

Code:

<%
  Dim OldValue
  Do While Not myRS.EOF
    If myRS("Column1") = OldValue Then
      ' Product has already been sent to the browser, so do nothing
    Else
      Response.Write(myRS("Column1"))
      myRS("Column1") = OldValue
    End If
    myRS.MoveNext()
  Loop
%>

This code prints out the value for Column1. Before it does that, it checks whether it has already been written. If not, it's value is added to the page Response, and the variable OldValue is filled with the current value from the Recordset.

You should consider the cause of the problem as well/ Should you duplicate records have been in the database in the first place?

Does this help?

Regards,

Imar

---------------------------------------
Imar Spaanjaars
Everyone is unique, except for me.