Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Importing Categories/Products/Sub items with Virtuemart CSVI

Finally after much trial/error/re-dos I finally have a grasp on correctly importing into virtuemart with the CSVI tool. Here is a run down to hopefully make it easier for you aka "me" later.

Note 1: Export your data from your existing store
The default in the CSVI is Carots ^ for field delimiters and tilde ~ to wrap text content.


Step 1:
Go into the CSVI templates and make a template that you can match your data too. Become familiar with the field listings . I ended up using category_path, category_list_order, category_full_image, category_description, category_publish, category_products_per_row, category_flypage.

Category_path -> use this field to setup your structure of parents and children

Make sure your images don't have a path i.e. 'someimg.jpg' not 'images/someimg.jpg' and are copied into the /components/com_virtuemart/shop_image/category/ folder.

Import the categories, then go into virtuemart category list and verify everything is correct

Note 2: make sure your categories are correct!! Every time you re-import your categories it will make new ones instead of overwriting the old ones which also screws up the products linked to the correct category. //BOO!!
Product import will update/overwrite existing products! //YEA!!


Step 2: Prep/import your products.
You need a csv import of products that will be listed under categories/sub-cats. These products will be added directly to your category structure using the category_path field. The Category_id didn't work for me so use the category_path instead. It will be something like 'Computers/hardware'.

Again the images don't need a path and need to be uploaded into /components/com_virtuemart/shop_image/products/

Step 2: Prep/import your sub-products.
Setup a product import with a blank CATEGORY_PATH and have the product_parent_sku setup. This field will need to have the EXACT product_sku of the parent product item.

Note 3: Products with a category path will be listed under the category NOT under the parent product.

Note 4: the product_currency field MUST BE UPPER case i.e. 'USD' otherwise it formats your prices to something random (I didn't bother trying to figure it out it probably uses EUR or something).

Note 5: When importing users, the users must be imported into joomla first then imported into virtuemart


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2 comments:

Todd Qualls said...

Josh,

This post has been a big help, but I am having trouble importing categories. CSVI reports success for each record/category imported, but there end up being no categories in the database. I can import products just fine.

Any insights about what might be happening?

Thanks in advance for the help.

Josh Tischer :: CodePyro said...

Todd,

post or email me an example of your category import josh@codepyro.com. It took me several times importing before i was able to get the import template right enough to work. Also you may need to remove all of your products and start with the categories first.

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