Importing Products to Product Manager [solved]

[point4design]

Has anyone successfully imported products from a csv to Product Manager? I can't seem to get it to work, keep getting 'field name' errors, and I can't find any documentation or instructions on what the fields should be named or how the csv should be setup. Can anyone help? I'm running the latest CMSMS and Product Manager module.

[point4design]

The exact error I'm getting is:

1::missing required field #FLAG

I've tried all of the field combinations/names I can think of but nothing seems to work.

[tyman00]

Can you please post more information about what you actually did? It is hard for us to know what you have/haven't tried till you tell us.

Also, please post the first 5-10 lines of your CSV so we can see how it is formatted.

[point4design]

To simplify things I've started by just trying to import one product through CSV then I'll move to importing many more. I've tried several combinations of info in my csv, but here is what I have currently:

1) Blue Sails Vine,Dk. Blue cultivar of native.  Blooms all summer. Sun/pt shade. Ht. 12',published


I've put the 1) to show that is the line number, that isn't really in my csv. I've also tried having column headers like product_name,details,status. I just can't seem to figure out the right combo and am missing something but I don't see any info in the documentation.

Thanks for any help you can offer.

[tyman00]

Did you change the delimiter in the import area from | to , ?

[point4design]

Yes. Do you happen to know what fields I need to include in the CSV? Does anyone have a sample CSV that they've imported that does work? I could use it as a template.

[tyman00]

Just talked to the developer of the module. If you go to the Products folder under the modules directory you will see a file called test_import.csv.  That will give you an example of what you need.

[alanchill]

Thanks for the advice tyman00 - I found that file and managed to successfully do an import into the 'products' module.  One thing that people might find handy is that in the example csv there are a couple of columns in the header which say:

...|#CAT:test1|#CAT:test2|...

I didn't spot this at first, and in each product line I added my category.  This resulted in two new categories being created called "test1" and "test2".  Once I spotted that I worked out what I had to do.  Next time I changed the header row to read:

...|#CAT:"Art Supplies"|#CAT:"Pens"|... (or whatever your categories are of course) and simply set the value of each of these columns to "1" (for true) and "0" (for false).  This then set the appropriate categories to the product being imported.

A few people have mentioned about changing the delimiter from a comma to a pipe (|) - I'd prefer not to do that, since that could break the format if you had commas in your fields (description etc).  A pipe character is safer since it's less commonly used in 'normal' prose.

One thing that would be great as future enhancement would be the ability to export products from the database.  I guess the easiest way to do this would be to actually write a template that would do it - this could simply output all data into a textarea on a web page.  From there just select all and paste into a text file, saving it with the correct extension.

Anyway, off to play with my new products database now.

Alan

[point4design]

Thank you all for your help!

[tyman00]

alanchill - The bonus with this import is you can specify which delimiter you want to use. As far as exporting goes, try using the CGFeedMaker module... you can set it up to generate an XML export. If you did the template correctly you could do a CSV output as well.

[alanchill]

tyman, thanks for the feedback - I'd not seen the FeedMaker module before so yep I'll try that one out.

Good point on the delimiter of course, the fact that you can change it (and most other parts of CMS Made Simple to be honest) is that you can set it up to suit yourself and the specific project you are working on.

Cheers,

Alan

[lisalee]

I have done all of the above steps and the test works fine but the import doesn't actually import the records.
Am I missing something?

[kendo451]

18 months later, getting same problem as lisa.  Was this a bug or a user error?  Solution?

I notice that after the test is complete, it shows the file to uploaded as "products.csv" instead of the name of the file uploaded for the test step.

Putting in a bug report now...

[alexbuckland]

Are you using the latest version of products?
I believe the error reporting on import of the csv was relaxed in the last release.

Also, it doesnt matter that your csv is renamed on import.

[kendo451]

Latest version of everything.  It passes the error test but does the popup window doesn't do anything when you go to the next stage.