Use Default Value automatically unchecked for all the fields of store when importing products

Question

I am running a Magento website having 2 Stores

a) store1

b) store2

I am almost using same data for both the stores except Store2 products "Meta titles" are different. So when I update Store2 Products meta_title using default Magento Import/Export functionality, store2 product updated successfully but all the other values of the updated product Use Default Value unchecked.

I searched a lot on google before posting this question but didn't get the solution to the problem.

My Queries :

1) Is Use Default Value uncheck of all values of the store is default behavior of Magento?

2) Is there any solution to fix this issue?

Answer 1

With the default ImportExport CSV format you can set store specific values for single attributes if and only if you also import the default values.

Example:

sku, _store, name          , meta_title
xxx,       , "Default Name", "Default Title"
   , store2,               , "Store 2 Title"

Here the meta_title attribute will be saved with a specific value for store2, while the name attribute will be saved as "Use default" in store2. Also the default values will be overwritten for all given columns.

Answer 2

1) Yes. Magento doesn't compare values between stores - it just checks if a value with this particular store id exists in database - if yes then the field "Use Default Value" is unchecked for this store. To Use Default Value again in this field, you'd have to remove values for this store from the database or simply check "Use default value" - AFAIK value from the store where it was checked would be deleted from the database (that requires confirmation). You'd have to do that for every store separately that's not the default one - in your case, it's just the second store.

2) Yes. Compare your values before an update or create a method that would be triggered from time to time and it would clean remaining values from other stores that are exactly same as the default one.

Edit: Some related questions:

• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22024288/how-are-store-website-specific-or-non-global-products-attributes-stored-querie

• How to Set Product attribute to 'Use Default' by SQL

• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4588824/mass-update-magento-field-to-use-default-value

• Reset "Use Default Value" for specific store view on all products