Using DataPort 7.7.251 to upload new store 7.0.7

[RichWendrock]

We created CSV files to upload all of our products. We thought we could create one CSV file with all of the fields needed for Product and Variant fields and then map the fields during the import process. That seem to go well. DataPort even gives the option to save your mapping to a template. After making a test run on 4 products, we found that the products were created properly and the categories assigned to those products were created. So good so far. Everything seem to go good expect the product image names did not record in the product record. when editing the Product the fields in Image and assets are blank. We tried to run the upload again making certain that all three image fields were selected. Since I have a 0 for ProductId, I expected the dataport to locate the product and update the image fields. In stead it created a new set of duplicate products. Still no images.

How do you get the images to record properly during the CSV upload?

The fields are in the example for the Products CSV file. http://wiki.ablecommerce.com/index.php/ ... CSV_Import:

[RichWendrock]

Here I am 10 days later and all 900+ products have been imported with options correctly applied and images all matched. I can't say it was fun. But compared to having to do it manually, As Tony would say, It's Great!!! Here is a little information for the next person who needs to work with the DataPort utility. Let double check and triple check be your by words. Our header column did not match the data column which caused the problem with image names. The process we used was to create four groups of files from the old database. Products-0001.CSV, Products-0001-Variants.CSV, ProductsInActive.CSV, ProductsInActive-Variants.CSV. Our export routines created one set of files for every 20 products. We found that to be a manageable number considering that we checked every product after the import to make sure it looked OK. We had a number of cases where we received warnings about Variants not found. Which did not make sense for a routine that should be creating the variants. A check of the product on which the error occurred, did not appear to be missing any of its options. The process is very smooth. We imported the variants first and then imported the products file next with Import New Object, Update existing objects set. That is the only way to do it since you could have products without variants. We got errors if we tried to upload the products file before the variants file. It appeared the variants import did not work when the product already existed. It would be more friendly if dataport would allow mapping of the variant import. That would allow the user to have one file with product and variant data. Another option would be to allow Update of variant information for existing products.

we had a few instances where the import did not record properly. For those instances we simple copied the import records from the import files, placed them in a rerun file and reran the import. In all instances the rerun worked so I am not sure what caused the products to fail initially. We saved all of the results files from the variants uploads. I plan to review each of those in detail. On one instance while importing one of the Products files, we got a message that said no products available for import. I tried copying one import statement to a separate file and it imported OK. Then I wrote all of the other statements to a separate CSV file and it ran without error. So I am not sure what was wrong with the initial file. But at least you have a workaround if the problem happens to you. I may have more on the utility later.