Exporting items does not show description for all variants

[prologuebooksho]

Hello,

I have a large library of items in my Square catalog. Many of those items have variations.

I occasionally export the library to use it for analysis and reporting. However, I have discovered what appears to be a bug with that output.

I know from previous import/export work that all item variants must share the same item name and description. This is also seen in the UI -- the fields for item name and description cannot be changed for item variants. That's fine.

The issue I am seeing is that when you export, each variant is a separate line, and any variants after the first one do not fill in the "description" field. That field should be filled in, since, as I noted above, each variant must share the same description.

I'm hoping this can be addressed soon, as that will help my use of the platform.

Thanks,

Dan

[Helen]

Hey @prologuebooksho, you're quite that right when you export your item library the description field isn't included for every item variation (variant). At this time it's not possible to include a different description for an item variation using the export, or when you create an item from your Dashboard or Point of Sale. So I can better understand this issue for you - were you trying to use this field to add other information? 

[prologuebooksho]

Hi Helen,

Right, I understand that I can't include a different description, or to add other information. I would just like the same description to be repeated for each of the variants in the exported information.

[Helen]

I believe that field is intentionally left blank. I'll see if I can get information about why it's blank for you! 

[prologuebooksho]

Thank you!

[ryanh · Accepted solution]

The reason that we only put the description on the first variation of the item in the export is so that you only have to edit the item's description once to change it. If you had an item with 10 variations and a very long description, it would be tricky to check if you had correctly edited all of the other 9 variation's descriptions as well since you can't see the whole description in Excel if it is long. You don't have to worry about the blank descriptions, Import will ignore the empty ones and it will only use an empty description if all of the variation's descriptions are empty.