AbleCommerce Shopping Cart Software

Naveed says in viewtopic.php?f=61&t=10053&p=48575#p48575 that 7.0.3 DataPort is in BETA. How about opening up to a small beta group as obviously from the look at your 7.0.x builds per discussions in this forum you need to expand your beta/QA effort. I again think that the DataPort should be open sourced (make the source available) and possibly post it on a site such as code.google.com or sourceforge, whatever. But quite frankly, I think the DataPort should be a web app as part of the Admin menu structure. I'm not sure why you went with a separate Winforms app. I am also a bit disappointed at the time frame from a 7.x FINAL build and the release of the DataPort. The schema updates should be code freezed long enough before the release such that the DataPort can be packaged in the product. And as I've suggested before, consider using ClickOnce for deployment so it's auto-updatable.

NC Software wrote:But quite frankly, I think the DataPort should be a web app as part of the Admin menu structure.

It has to do with the size of the datasets. We had all of this in a web app in AC55. Then you'd get someone with a 75MB store file that they wanted to import. The web app is not optmized for dealing with that kind of dataset. We have been trying to bring back some of the web based batch tools.

I am sorry about the timeframe. Circumstances beyond our control are bringing a delay in the QA. I have linked the raw 7.0.3 dataport utility. Please feel free to try it out, but keep it within this group.

Thanks Logan.

Research MTOM for web services/WCF services. Large datasets are not a big deal if you use a little magic with binary serialization, MTOM protocol, web.config settings to allow the larger sizes, keep alives etc. (vBulletin does it (their mass e-mailer, etc.)!!! Ha Ha).

I get the impression that the DataPort is a contracted out software project that is essentially out of your control?

NC Software wrote:I get the impression that the DataPort is a contracted out software project that is essentially out of your control?

Not at all. It's the QA piece that I can't fix. We have people out of office. As far as I know dataport is ready. It just needs me to sign the executable. I feel funny doing that without a coordinated agreement from everyone else. I don't usually publish the software.

The dataport was also intended to handle links to client side applications that cannot be handled via the web, like UPS worldship.

Logan_AbleCommerce wrote:

NC Software wrote:But quite frankly, I think the DataPort should be a web app as part of the Admin menu structure.

It has to do with the size of the datasets. We had all of this in a web app in AC55. Then you'd get someone with a 75MB store file that they wanted to import. The web app is not optmized for dealing with that kind of dataset. We have been trying to bring back some of the web based batch tools.

I am sorry about the timeframe. Circumstances beyond our control are bringing a delay in the QA. I have linked the raw 7.0.3 dataport utility. Please feel free to try it out, but keep it within this group.

Actually, I for one, am glad that you made it a standalone application. Many of us have been with Able for a long time and it's only natural for our data to grow so 75MB is really no big deal. My data has a tendency to break the dataport and I can't wait to try the 7.0.3 version.

I think the largest store export I ever saw was 135MB. XML is not very compact.

I think the way to do it web'wise in a situation with larger files is that they FTP it up and then they tell the web page area the file location and NOT use a Browse/Upload system. I've seen web systems (yep, vBulletin) do this where you can either browse for a file OR set the path on the site where to pick it up.

Neal we had that ability in AC55. The problem was processing a 135MB file... if we tried to do it on an ASPNET thread the server would timeout. We would have had to set up async processing (which isn't too hard now) to launch the work and then show progress.

Logan_AbleCommerce wrote:I think the largest store export I ever saw was 135MB. XML is not very compact.

and the largest that I saw was 192MB ...
Naveed has seen some files greater than 200MB as well

I think it could be done. It's all how you architect it.

ZIP (compress), transfer, UNZIP, DoStuff.

If you do it ALL in one web page lifecycle, yeah, you may have a timeout. If you do part 1, refresh, part 2, refresh, part 3, refresh, then you don't have the problem.

Doesn't matter, was just curious and obviously concerned about the tremendous lag between production release and DataPort update for the production release.

OK, this may have been asked already but do we have a date on when the dataport for AC 7.0.3 will be ready?

Ryancampbellmba wrote:OK, this may have been asked already but do we have a date on when the dataport for AC 7.0.3 will be ready?

A beta version is available and link is provided in 2nd post of this thread.

Any issues with the new beta DataPort? Any feed back about the new features?

It will not run on my recently build machine running Vista Ultimate 64 Bit OS.

It tells me that the AbleCommerce DataPort has stopped working

A problem caused the program to stop working correctly. Windows will close the program and notify you if a solution is available.

Try right click on the DataPort icon and select Run As Administrator.

Yeah, I thought about that as well. But I don't get that option when right clicking on the dataport icon. But in my other programs I get that option. I will keep on investigating.

Can you set the shortcut to run as administrator? I can't because I've already got the permissions set that way or maybe Able doesn't allow it- my box is grayed out.

I'm using Vista x64 and don't have any problems running it. I have UAC disabled which you can disable in the Windows Control Panel User Accounts area, reboot and retry.

OK, got it working. The culprit was my Kaspersky Anti Virus software.

Since the Dataport was not digitally signed it thought it was in my best interest to lower the security levels thus preventing the program from running properly. I went ahead and manually adjusted the security on the dataport installation folder and now it runs properly.

To Judy:

My screen looks just like yours. Admin is blanked out.

I just installed the Data Utility on my 7.0.3 development site (Windows 2008/SQL 2008) and exported my DB .... the resulting XML is almost 500mb! (maybe I should purge my data?)

Ran like a champ, though....

OK, I did the dataport over the weekend I will be delivering a write up with my experience in the next day or so once I analyze the data.

I downloaded the latest release and it threw the expected 7.0.3 blah blah 7.0 error with my 7.0.3 install. The install put an icon on my desktop. At least it kept all my site connections.

Then I downloaded this 7.0.3 beta and installed it. I got an entirely different icon on the desktop. All my site connections are gone and had to be recreated.

Now I have two icons on my desktop.

Now I have two dataport application folders in \Program Files.

Do I have two different versions of dataport installed on the same computer?

This is kind of confusing and I do this for a living.

AbleMods wrote:Do I have two different versions of dataport installed on the same computer?

Yes, you can install different versions of DataPort side by side on same machine. DataPort version 7.0.3.1 beta is only for AbleCommerce 7.0.3 version of stores. And DataPort for 7.0.2.1 is only supports 7.0.2 version of stores and so on...

We have a different version of DataPort software for each version of AbleCommerce Store. And if you have multiple stores having different versions you have to install different versions of DataPort application. If you will try to use a wrong version of DataPort with your store you can get un-expected errors and can corrupt your data.

Here you can find which version of DataPort is suitable for which version of store:
viewtopic.php?f=61&t=11102