AbleCommerce Shopping Cart Software

Hello All,

I have taken on a project to migrate an existing AC 5.5 store (asp.net) to the latest Gold release, and am running into road blocks with the Data Port tool among other issues trying to get the data over. The ONLY things I need to bring over is categories & products. We are not bringing over anything else.

Is there a reasonably easy and available path to perform this operation?

Thanks in advance for your help!

You can upgrade from AC 5.5 to AC Gold, but you have to upgrade to AC707 or AC 706 first and you have to use DataPort utility for that purpose then from AC706/7 it will be an automatic database upgrade to AC Gold. Please check following links to determine your upgrade path:


1. http://help.ablecommerce.com/upgrades/a ... erce_7.htm
2. http://help.ablecommerce.com/upgrades/a ... o_gold.htm
3. http://help.ablecommerce.com/faqs/ablec ... _path_.htm

If you're not worried about bringing over users and orders, then you can also try using the Data Migration feature within Gold. Using a CSV file, you can import products and/or product with their options (variants). Here is a link to the documentation.

http://help.ablecommerce.com/mergedProj ... change.htm

What I suggest is to get a working copy of Gold installed. Then create one or two products that are similar to the products in the 5.5 store. Use the Export Product feature in Gold to give you the format you need for importing.

This might be quicker than upgrading the database 3 times, although that is a viable option too.

Katie - I like your thinking and I was thinking about the same path. I don't want to have to install any previous version. I already have Gold up and running and need to get these products and categories over ASAP! When I installed Gold, I installed the sample products (the computer store). Then, I exported them all (for a sampling of the data file), deleted them all in the store admin, then imported them and it worked like a charm. My biggest task will be the Product > Category association. I am now looking to hire a data engineer to perform this operation for me. I know there have been a lot of versions and releases of Able since 5.5 and it's our fault for letting it get too far gone, but... it still would have been nice to have a path provided by Able. It looks like the Data Port project has been all but abandoned.

It sounds like you are already on the right track. I just have one more suggestion, and it depends on how many products you are trying to work with. But, if it's not tens of thousands, then you might want to break them down into a few top-level categories before importing. (All products have to be assigned to at least one primary category) Then you can create and organize the full category structure later. AC Gold has some nice features where you can easily move big groups of products around to different categories. Just a thought...

For Gold, we decided to bring the Dataport features directly into the product for a number of reasons. Namely, to make it easier on our customers. We always had a lot of support trouble with the client app installation.

Thanks Katie. I can completely understand. I have a little over 3,000 products and about 280 categories (including sub-categories). Since I did not see a "Category Import or Export" feature, I figured it would just automatically create the categories when you imported the products based on what you had in the Categories column in the Products CSV, like this: "Sample Category:Computers and Electronics:Kit Components". Is my assumption correct here in that the Categories will be automatically created when you import Products if the data in this column is in order?

Yes, you are correct. When you import products, you'll have two Category Update Options -

1) Add to categories specified in uploaded data, or
2) Add to categories already created in the catalog.

If the category specified in the uploaded data does not exist, one will be created for you. It works great, and I'm sure you'll have your data in the store in no time.

Good Luck
Katie

Good news. Thanks Katie!