strange results 'check marking' page and product records

[avefenix]

This is a little windy, but I have just spent almost a whole work day on it and find it at best confusing, and in one case astounding.
We use V9 and have all page and product data on local databases which are continually changed and uploaded at least daily.
Once in a while I will make a temporary manual change to a record in the back room for a quick test, but all will be overlaid with the next upload.
Long ago, I had noticed that in some cases a "'checked' or null toggle" (specified that way in the V9 online help) of the uploaded data did not accept null or zero-length-string as 'NOT checked', but if I put in text which was NOT the word 'checked' it unchecked the option in the back room.

That's til yesterday. Hmm!

Yesterday, I was working with a new product and did not want the more info page on the google sitemap. I had the local database option loaded with 'no' and uploaded, but when I was making changes to that page in the back room, I noticed that it was checked to be included. That is... the checkmark was shown under Products > Google Sitemap settings > Include in Sitemap. To shorten the story, I could NOT do anything automated to uncheck it. (Upload a null, a zero length text, other text, even a '0' and a '-1' thinking of a binary field - (pretty desperate, right?)). Even if I unchecked manually and then immediately published, the checkmark reappeared magically. Incredible. Jump past some hours... I decided to see that the product was in fact in the sitemap having really no reason to think it would not be there since it remains checked in the backroom. AND IT WAS NOT THERE. Short story: The checkmark never failed to be in the backroom record, but if I uploaded 'checked' it appeared in the sitemap, and if I uploaded 'no', it did not. I had an additional original record which WAS to be included and which had ALL the exact same specs of the new, and even though it would be in the sitemap and the new one NOT, just as I want it. They both show the 'Include in sitemap' checked in the back room, AND every option button on the two backroom records is the same. (What is the generator looking at to decide if it goes in the map or not?)

Since now I know that it seems to work well off the upload data (it's a csv file recreated one or more times a day, with google indexing about 1100 pages), what is the goal here? Well, at best to report an apparent error in the indications in the back room (What would a person loading data manually do with this option button?), and secondly perhaps to save someone else the hours I spent struggling to understand the incongruities of the indications I was getting.

And by the way, the mapping between the csv file and the shopsite upload fields uses identical names on both sides and is mapped correctly.

[Jim]

First version 9 is a number of years old (initial release Nov 2007) so issues found in it might be fixed in the current version.

Have you tried using "unchecked" for the value.

As for the sitemap being updated sometimes and not other times do you have the option to create the sitemap checked under Utilites > Publish?

Is the product you are not seeing in the sitemap assigned to a page? If not no moreinfo page will be created so there would be nothing to put in the sitemap.