Uploading Data to an empty Database

[David M. Clark]

Hello.

We are trying to import .CSV (Category, Product and Variants) files from an existing AbleCommerce Database to a new empty AbleCommerce Database. What is happening is the Product ID from the CSV file is being ignored and a new ProductId is created. This is understandable since the ProductId appears to be an auto-incremented index file. BUT the problem occurs when we try to import the Variant.CSV file since it cannot find any correct Product ID's

Two Questions.
1. Is there a way to force Dataport to use the ProductID from the imported CSV file instead of creating a new one?
2. If not, How can we get the Variant.CSV import to ignore the Product.Id.

Please we are a week in trying to get this to work.. Something I must be missing. Need help quickly.

Thanks
David M. Clark

[jmestep]

You can keep the same product ids if you use the Able 5 store xml import file, but the only thing I can think of for you to do as far as importing a csv file would be to upload a file with enough lines of dummy data to get you past the highest product id you have. Then upload the file with the real data in it and select to update existing products. Then delete the unused ones. If it is OK with you to do it without keeping the same product ids, I've found that importing the variants first works best then using a sku match to import the rest of the product data. The product gets created with the variant upload and when you go back and use a sku match on the product upload, the other data gets populated. I use the same file for both, but I had to change the name of a couple of the columns because they were supposed to be different in the variant upload.

[David M. Clark]

HI
Thanks for the input. We have tried a dozen different methods but not this methods. I did have to set the distributor's ProductID in the variant file to 0. We are currently trying it. If it works we still have a question. We will be receiving these files quarterly from the distributor. We can get them as XML or CSV but his will have different product ID's again. So what will that procedure look like?

Thanks so much.

David

[David M. Clark]

Judy.

Tried your approach and we had the products with variants after the variant.csv upload. however when we then did the UPdate with the products.csv file using the SKU as the match, We seemed to have lost most of the variants.. any ideas?

Thanks
David