Tips on Mass Uploading Inventory in Virtuemart with CSVi

Written by Georg Friday, 26 February 2010 14:31

Don't get scared, we're not gonna reproduce some online manual at hand. The tips listed below are coming from our hands-on experience with one or more customers. Joomla and VirtueMart is serving their online business sales and CSVi is the component that's making their mass data uploads a breeze. 

Some lil things:

1. The [excel].xls file must be properly converted into csv and NO "$" sign in the price cells, because the mySQL data base requires numerical data in the price field. 

2. Because the import xls file from the client was having leftovers, even an image forgotten in some distant cell, we had to clean it up by selecting only the columns/rows of interest, copying them and pasting to another worksheet, a pristine worksheet. You should always do this before saving as CSV text file format. This because heavy worked excel [xls] files may escape with some undesired fields in them, leftovers, and simply saving to CSV the entire XLS file may result in corrupt data.

3. And because this import had only 6 fields [in a particular case], we had to create a new import template in the CSVi component settings. This by cloning the current one and publishing, in the clone template, only the exact same fields as in the import file [about to be imported]. 

4. Oh yes, found this header:

product_parent_sku

on second column, in the XLS from the client...

Underneath following this kind of data:

Electronic Assembly/repair

which field describes the category path, or this:

category_path

field from the third column.

So, all in all, the XLS file was having some slipped rows/columns.

5. OK, now you can see the clean CSV file, this file is having to match PRECISELY the field construct in the cloned CSVi component template that you can see here:

backend. admin > components > csv improved > templates > CSVI Product Import_20100225_070913 [example name].

Make sure you check the radio box near any template. Then press a button top right, according to what you're wanting to do with it. Do not press [delete], play some with them, clone some, just don't delete, and tweak fields ONLY in the playing clones you've made. This way you'll figure it out much faster than one can write in a blog. Essential is this: the structure of the CSV file must be IDENTICAL to the field structure in the template of import.

6. Also notice that when we execute an import then we're having to select a template, and that is the one that matches the CSV.

7. Field delimiters and text delimiters. For convenience we have chosen the sign  ^ [caret] to be the field delimiter and the sign ~ [tilde] to be the text delimiter. This can be configured with each template in part. Why those such rare odd signs?

Because it's less likely than comma [,] or double quotes ["] to appear at random occasions throughout the CSV file and ruin the field matching.

Good luck and leave a comment if needing more help.

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