Multiple, critical problems - EZ POP

[double-happiness]

Thanks for the responses.

I did try to uninstall EP using /easypopulate.php?langer=remove but nothing happened.

Here's a sample of my file for what it's worth:

v_products_model v_products_image v_products_name_1 v_products_description_1 v_products_url_1 v_specials_price v_specials_date_avail v_specials_expires_date v_products_price v_products_weight v_date_avail v_date_added v_products_quantity v_manufacturers_name v_categories_name_1 v_categories_name_2 v_categories_name_3 v_categories_name_4 v_categories_name_5 v_categories_name_6 v_categories_name_7 v_tax_class_title v_status EOREOR

1 92544.jpg 666: D.E.V.I.L. 2x12" 666: D.E.V.I.L.<BR>2x12"<BR>House Nation DST 70713-12<BR>Germany 2000<BR><BR>D.E.V.I.L. (Break The Spell Mix)<br>D.E.V.I.L. (What The Hell Mix)<br>Alarma!<br>Diablo<br>Amokk<br>D.E.V.I.L.<br>Bomba!<br>I'm Your Nitemare<br>Paradox<BR><BR>Condition media / cover: Very Good Plus (VG+) / Generic<BR> 3.99 450 1 Trance --none-- 1 EOREOR

Maybe special characters in my category names are causing problems, I've used these:

& , - / '

[double-happiness]

So just use letters, nothing else? I don't know what is the exact defintion of a special character...

[schoolboy]

You are using " to indicate INCHES... Change these to In.

The " character can cause problems.

So can ' .

[schoolboy]

And as I said... the problems are most often data quality.

You should TEST one product (yes... just one product in a TXT file).

If this works then EP works... Any subsequent issues will be with DATA.

[double-happiness]

Wow, that is a bit of a suprise.

I don't quite know what to make of that as my main sale items are 12" singles.

The galling thing is, all my stock is uploaded and my shop displays fine, it's just the admin area I'm having problems with. It would be quite a blow not to be able to use the primary search term my customers are looking for. It's too bad I don't sell CDs...! I am almost exclusively a vinyl trader! Hmmmn...

[CoolCarPartsOnline]

OR invest $75 for the commercial version. Even though it hasn't been updated in 3 years and there are no support for it, It works every time even with special characters such as (", ').

I can understand Free is good, but the tool the allow you to import/export your store files is worth few bucks.

The Free version is limited and from what I read in it's support thread (Which is very lengthy) hard to add or change fields for the templates.

EP Advanced work on my stores with more than 200,000 products, I can upload 10000 product in one click.

[double-happiness]

I'll bear that in mind.

I guess at least with my inventory up (in spite of all these incorrect additional categories) and a working store (apparently) the best thing to do would be to bide my time and see how things go, at least until I next need to do an update on my stock.

When I had an OSCommerce store it got hacked and was deleted by my webhost, so there is still lots of time for things to go catastrophically wrong before I start tinkering with things!

At least I feel a bit calmer as I have a better idea what is probably causing the problems, so that is something. It really never occured to me it could be something as simple as a quotation mark.

Thanks all. Any other pointers are welcome of course.

[schoolboy]

If you are using MS Excel to work the initial spreadsheet, you will find that it forces unwanted formatting - even if you choose to save the file as a tab-delimited text file.

Annoyingly, when Excel sees " in the data, it assumes you also want to delimit text using inverted commas, and it will pepper the resultant txt file with inverted comma symbols. Sometimes, it places these after a tab space resulting in the next field being delimited by inverted commas.

Easy Populate gets confused with this. However, it CAN tolerate inverted commas within the field contents - so your 12" should be OK.

So... how does one circumvent excel's tendency to pepper the TXT file with " . ?

I have found a possible solution - but you will need a program like CRIMSON EDITOR or EMERALD EDITOR (both are free text editors - use Google to find the download).

Install Emerald Editor, open it at an empty file... then...

1. In your excel spreadsheet, HIGHLIGHT the range of cells containing your data (ie: all the columns across and all the rows down THAT CONTAIN DATA. (Do not highlight the entire sheet.

2. COPY that highlighted block.

3. Go over to Enmerald editor, and use CTRL+V (paste) the block.

4. It should behave nicely, and paste EXACTLY the data, and NOT put unwanted " marks directly ahead of, or behind TAB spaces.

5. SAVE the emerald editor file as your xxxxxxxxx.txt file.

6. Load that through easy Populate.

(You could delete ALL product data in your store - to remove duplicates - by grabbing a EP dump of your current store data, then using v_status = 9, then importing that into EP. Be careful here... you MUST backup your images folder first. I usually rename my images folder to images_bak, and then create a new, empty images folder. If you fail to do this, a v_status=9 will delete all your images too. Then, with a cleaned out product database, load your new file created via Emerald Editor, into your store.)

One other downside of this is that all your products will assume new ID's, so if you have attributes, you may lose the associations. Also, historical order data may be lost too, as the original id will be gone, and the product that owned it will have a new id. I have worked around this too, by getting EP to export the product ID field contents, then making sure to start the database's increment at 0 again - (requires phpMyAdmin knowledge).