Dataport seems too buggy

[good peeps]

It seems like a great attempt, but the dataport utility doesn't work in many ways. I have able ver. 7.0.6 and I was having too much trouble uploading new categories. It seemed that it wasn't able to correctly use arbitrary id and parent ids. I had to create the parents first and then get their ids to map them for the subcategories. I also changed the chunk size. Now, when I try and update the categories with customurl data, I get: Invalid column name 'CustomUrl'. even though this column is created from the download and is also in the mapping category. Any ideas to get around this problem.

[good peeps]

Here is another attempt. I made some changes and get the following:

Object reference not set to an instance of an object.
ImportOrUpdate unsuccessful for Category
CategoryId = 0
Name = Environmental Control
Error message: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.