[Bug or Feature?] url_path attribute value is not populated for any product

[MagePsycho]

Preconditions

1. Magento CE 2.1.1
2. PHP 5.6
3. Nginx 1.9

Steps to reproduce

1. Try to save(new or existing) any product
2. Go to MySQL client and check for url_path value for that product as:
   SELECT * FROM catalog_product_entity_varchar WHERE attribute_id IN ( SELECT attribute_id FROM eav_attribute WHERE attribute_code IN ('url_path') AND entity_type_id = 4 ) AND entity_id = <product_id>
3. There won't be any result.
   In fact there is no any value at all on product level for url_path.

Expected result

1. In such case, url_path value should look like [product-url-key][product-suffix-from-setting]

Actual result

1. Empty value for url_path for any product

Queries:

• is this a bug or feature?
• If it's a feature any reason behind not populating the url_path value for products?
• is it safe to delete all the url_path values for migrated products?

[veloraven]

@MagePsycho thank you for your report.
Please report EE issues via the Support portal of your account or Partner portal if you are a partner reporting on behalf of a merchant.
Github is intended for Community edition reports given no account management for CE users. This will allow for proper tracking of issues at the account level.

[MagePsycho]

@veloraven This is happening for both CE & EE.

[garfix]

It is important to notice that starting to use a url_path for products will have an important performance penalty.

Currently it is already the case that when the url_key of a parent category changes, this affects the url_paths of all child categories. And the url_rewrite entries for these categories.

If a url_path for products is the be kept current, it will be the case that when the url_key of a parent category changes, this affects the url_paths of all both child categories and child products, recursively. This in turn will have an effect on all their url_rewrite table entries.

[keyurshah070]

Started Investigating @okobchenko @ishakhsuvarov

[thiagolima-bm]

I am working on it at #mm17es

[sdzhepa]

Hello @MagePsycho

Thank you for contribution and collaboration!

Internal Magento team has investigated the issue and as result, all related internal tickets were closed with resolution Won't Fix
Reason :

this ticket can be closed as url_path is deprecated.

[kasperth]

Hi @sdzhepa

From my understanding the url_path is still being used for categories. A new magento 2.4.3-p1 installation includes url_path for categories, and are also generated when creating new categories and updating already existing ones.

Can you refer to documentation about url_path and it being deprecated?
Thanks in advance.

[hostep]

@kasperth: there is no mention of categories in the opening post. This issue had to do with products.

But you are both correct though, the url_path of products is not used in Magento2, but the url_path of categories is definitely still being used 🙂

[tim-breitenstein-it]

Unfortunately there is a usage: ProductUrlPathGenerator.php#L79

This causes us URL-Rewrite bugs, because url_path is forced over url_key during Url path generation and canot be edited anymore.

[hostep]

Yep, I still don't understand why that code hasn't been thrown away (maybe backwards compatibility for merchants that still have that field filled in in their database and rely on it somehow, who knows ...)

Anyway, that's why you should keep the field empty in the database, if you want the url_key field to work.

(shameless advertisement: https://github.com/baldwin-agency/magento2-module-url-data-integrity-checker for a module to check for this)