Auto populate meta field with text from a product name

Technical Q&A

Topic summary

A user seeks to auto-populate metafields by extracting text from product names (specifically content within square brackets like “[Sub Name]”) to enable custom sorting across thousands of products without manual editing.

Proposed Solution:

  • Use Shopify Flow app to automate metafield population
  • Initial suggestion uses product status updates as trigger, but user needs a trigger requiring no manual intervention

Implementation Approach:

  • Use “Product added to store” trigger for new products
  • Create separate flow to batch-process existing products
  • Challenge: Flow repeatedly processes same 100 items instead of skipping already-processed products
  • Workaround suggested: Use product tags (e.g., “tag_not:processed”) to filter unprocessed items, since filtering by metafields in queries may be problematic

Related Use Case:

  • Another user asks about auto-generating sequential product ID numbers for migrated products
  • Suggested approach: Store counter in shop metafield, increment on product creation, though Shopify’s native unique IDs are recommended as simpler alternative
  • Code snippet provided showing how to reference both legacy and new product IDs

Status: Discussion remains open with implementation details being refined.

Summarized with AI on November 1. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
6

Yeah, you’d need an advanced query for this and I vaguely remember there was a problem with filtering by metafields, sorry not sure if it’s still a problem, can’t test right now.

However one workaround possible is to use tags for this purpose, say, select products without a tag, with query like tag_not:processed, process them and assign this tag…

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