Magento

I Deleted all my categories to see what would happen -

Could you help with these questions:

What happens?
what actually happens when i delete a category?
1) Does it delete all products under that category?
2) does it delete all folders created by that category
3) does it delete all folders/images for each product under that category

What I noticed when deleting categories
1) I got no warnings when deleting about cross store categories
2) I got no warning about a catagory having products in it
3) all folders / images associated with a category & products under that category still exist on my server.
4) i had no list of products in my admin area, BUT still had all products in the database

what should actually happen when deleting a category?

This info could also help with writing an import/export utility, ie knowing how the table relationships work would be very usefull for inport/export, i know we could figure it out, but its a good wiki topic....

1) I got no warnings when deleting about cross store categories

this will be implemented in future releases

2) I got no warning about a catagory having products in it

Categories and Products are separate entities and do not depend on each other.
So when you delete a category, this action only removes links between products and categories, not the products themselves.

3) all folders / images associated with a category & products under that category still exist on my server.

We are going to rewrite media management for both categories and products.
After that all the media belonging to an entity will be cleaned when entity is deleted.

4) i had no list of products in my admin area, BUT still had all products in the database

You still should have list of products in “catalog / manage products” page.

Ok, so its all still comming....cool

had another looks and system seemed to clean itself when i loged out and in again, then all my products apeared in product list again.

I am still a little confused about table relationships, so i can write an importer,

ie catalog_category_entity_varchar still has all the names of the old categories ie 139 entries
but other tables such as catalog_category_entity only has 14 entries now after i added a few new categories.

I am sure it will all be revield in time, Great work guys!