How To: Editing Catalog Validity Dates Impact on the Listings

The listing is identified as an instance of an item or variant for a specific channel and a specific date interval. Each Catalog will generate listings for each item/variant, each channel and each date interval (catalog valid from and valid to). Listings are created during the catalog validation. They are not fully functional yet and cant be published. Once the publishing process happens they become fully functional listings. If after validation or publish the validity dates for the catalog changes, new listings will be created and the old ones will be expired. The expiration means that the valid to date of the previous listings changes to today or if the catalog valid from is in the future to that date -1. Upon publishing, that ensures a smooth transition from the old listings to the new one with a different interval. The business reason to create new listings instead of modifying the existing ones is that listings are involved in purchase transactions. By modifying existing listings there is the possibility that purchase transaction may now fall outside of listings validity dates. That is not acceptable from the consistency point of view and it may affect reporting and not only. You can change the validity interval for a catalog without any problem as long as the catalog was never validated or published.