AbleCommerce Shopping Cart Software

Brand new to Able and am having an issue getting products to show up. I've written an import program that reads products from a .cvs and then creates the Product records in ac_Products. The products are in the table but when I try to view the store, the products don't show up. I've compared my new products to the products that came pre-built into Able and there is nothing in the ac_Products table that looks any different between the original product records and my newly inserted ones. Anyone now what bit I need to flip and where to get the products from ac_Products to actually show on the page? Thanks in advance and sorry for the noob question.

Have you checked in your Admin -->Catalog --> Orphaned Items?

cbender wrote:Brand new to Able and am having an issue getting products to show up. I've written an import program that reads products from a .cvs and then creates the Product records in ac_Products. The products are in the table but when I try to view the store, the products don't show up. I've compared my new products to the products that came pre-built into Able and there is nothing in the ac_Products table that looks any different between the original product records and my newly inserted ones. Anyone now what bit I need to flip and where to get the products from ac_Products to actually show on the page? Thanks in advance and sorry for the noob question.

We provide a tool called DataPort which helps you import/export data in CSV format for products. Instead of writing your custom scripts better try DataPort to do CSV import/export. Please read this topic about DataPort http://wiki.ablecommerce.com/index.php/ ... rt_Utility

I have been reading about this tool but for our needs, we are pulling product data from 3 locations (locally generated .csv from a price database maintained internally, inventory counts from an external system not tied to our website, and product information from a 3rd party web service).

What I'm doing is creating a page within the Able Commerce admin menu that will allow our users to upload the .csv and update existing records and insert new records, grab inventory info from the external system, and smush it all together with the product details from the 3rd party web service. I'm looking to build this as an all in one, simple UI to make product updates as easy as possible for the user. Introducing the tool you speak of would add another step for the users and this just isn't the direction we are trying to go.

Regarding the other reply about "orphaned", shazam! There are my products! OK so what makes them orphaned? My thought is that just adding the products to the ac_Products table isn't doing it (clearly) so what other tables need to be touched per product in order to ensure they are not orphaned? Any advise on this would be amazingly, greatly appreciated. My trial and error adjustments to these database records are taking too much time and I feel like I'm just spinning my wheels. There has to be some other table that needs a value per product record that will make them unorphaned. Any ideas? Thanks again.

Seems like you are missing the category mappings for products. If for some reason there is no parent category for a product then system takes it as orphaned. Make sure that you specified parent category for every product.

Yes, this appears to be the issue. I went into an orphaned product, did the edit, and went to the category tab. I selected a category, applied, and now that product shows in the product list.

So as part of the web service I'm getting product data from, it also contains a list of categories. I've sucked the categories down into the ac_Categories table but they don't show in the admin tool. So...along with my "how to tie products to categories" issue, I now have to figure out how to populate categories and "parents", then tie the products accordingly...

Could you point me to some documentation on how the ac_Categories ties to the ac_CategoryParents? I think I need to pull that data down, get it linked up, to create the appropriate categories and then figure out how to link the products to the categories via code...

Just found, and am reading, http://wiki.ablecommerce.com/index.php/ ... Categories Maybe this'll do the trick. Thanks.

For anyone else who may need it, this is how I am making sense of the 3 Category Import related tables and how they touch each other.

And to continue how to link the products to the categories, I found an orphaned product. Selected to edit it's "Category" and selected an item from my newly populated category list. Once I hit save, a new record was created in ac_Categories and now my item shows up in the list of products. The new record looks like this. Hope this helps someone down the road (or me again a week from now when I can't remember what I figured out today. lol).