Offline program for product creation..am I going in the right direction?

[irischant]

I've made a program for creating music type products offline, for an upcoming store of mine. It's basically just a data entry program with a nice interface, tweaked for my own specific requirements. I enter the product/details & when all is said it done, the program creates a single .sql file filled with all of the new products for for me to drop in Zencart's SQL query executor. It works quite well for me as-is, with the few options that I need & the few products (less than 50) that I'm entering at a time.

Now, the main thing here is that I'm looking at possibly amping it up with more functionality to share with the community & was wondering what the drawbacks may be to this approach (namely with the sql file growing larger & larger as the programs options/features grow larger & larger).

It would be possible for me to make the program communicate directly with mySql to eliminate the need for the sql file upload in ZenCart, but I'm not going to kick up the extra umph to do that if the current process would be just as functional as-is. Quite honestly, my mySql knowledge isn't too terribly advanced. I made the program just knowing what info a ZenCart database needs. Knowing how much ZenCart's sql executor can handle is unknown to me. Anyone care to shed some light on how powerful you may have already found the executor to be? Any thoughts on the whole idea would be much appreciated...thanks!

[Wils]

Hi,

I think your approach sounds very interesting. As I don't know how you coded the SQL generation, I don't know how difficult it would be update the approach to keep track of what has already been uploaded. However, if all is always kept in the SQL file, it would act as a backup as well.

What is particularly interesting with this approach is that one could in detail see what is done in the SQL file, which is not the case with some other solutions.

Also, I guess that the SQL patch could be run from any MySQL interface, not only Zen-Cart, which opens some new options for updating the cart.

I think the community would be interested in seeing what you have and assist in testing and suggesting enhancements.