Easy Populate 1.2.5.4 support

[Phil020782]

Hi,
I installed easy populate standard a few days ago and I just have a few quick question if anyone could answer them for me please.

1. if I enter a catagory in the excel spreadsheet that does not exist in my store will that catagory be automatically created when the file is uploaded?

2. Is there anything to stop me from adding attribute columns to the main spreadsheet so that I can insert products and the relevant attributes all from the same file?

3. Regarding the attributes, is there anyway to set the attribute flags from the spreadsheet so if its a required text attribute for example I can set it in the spreadsheet rather than having to go into attribute controller and change them?

Thanks
Phil

[kobra]

Phil,

EP is not an extensible tool but does what it does well, Follow these steps and if you have created and set the permissions correctly for the itmes in the install instructions you will get a file downloaded that contains what it is that you can use this for.

1 - From admin click on tools>easy populate.
2 - Click on Download Complete tab-delimited .txt file to edit (Attributes Not Included).
3 - Import this file into Excel and make changes to various records.
4 - Export the file from Excel (making sure it's still in Tab Delimited format.
5 - Back to easy populate... On Upload EP File click on Browse and select my file (the one I exported from Excel).
6 - Click on Insert into db.

[Phil020782]

Hi kobra,

I have EP working perfectly as described above my main concern was to see if its possible to set attribute flags, such as required text and display only etc, from within the tab delimited text file. I realise this would have to be done in the attribute file rather than the complete but can you tell me what columns would need adding to the file to set the flags?

Thanks

[kobra]

EP does not do attributes.... and one can not add or extend it for reasons that I am not sure of having not disected the code.

Attributes have many many cross entries and are best handled via admin

[Phil020782]

EP does not do attributes.... and one can not add or extend it for reasons that I am not sure of having not disected the code.

Attributes have many many cross entries and are best handled via admin

It does do attributes, I've already done it but it doesn't set the attribute flags just the name and values

[admcompa]

Anybody working on easy populate. I need it to be able to upload my map prices to my products. If someone can make this work I would be willing to pay some for it. Thanks

Doug

[awev]

Hello Admcompa,
First, you have to know what table in the database MAP is using, and also what fields you would need to update.

Next, open the easypopulate.php file that is in the admin directory, into a text editor, you don't want to use a word processer if you can help it, they like to add stuff for formatting of the text, etc. If you have anything like HotDog or Crimson Editor you should not have a problem editing things, nor seeing the differant parts of the code (color coding of code is nice ;) ).

If there is a goto command you may want to use that, and tell it to go to line 1280 or so for staters. In the text editor press <ctrl>+F for find. Enter v_ as the string to search for, and you will begin finding a lot of it. You realy don't need the find command if you jump to (goto) line 1280. If you want to set a MAP price of 0 (zero) as a default value, then you would add it to the end of the "$default_these = array( " array as something like 'v_map'. This is where the info you gathered at the start, such as database table and fields come in handy.

Now we use the find command to find '$sql = "SELECT' without the single quotes ('). In the unmodified version it should be around line 1429. Under the line ' subc.catergories_id as v_categories_id' you will want to add ' m.map as v_map', then in the table section add a comma to ' ".TABLE_PRODUCTS_TO_CATEGORIES." as ptoc'. Now add an entry for the table you are using, something like ' ".MAP." as m' This section checks to see if it is a new item, or if you need to update some information.

Press <F3> for the find again command, or whatever your text editor has assigned to the find again/repeat find command. You will be able to search for $sql = "UPDATE and $sql = "INSERT as well. The main thing is to add pairs of values, being left = right, such as database_table_value_1 = file_value_1, and telling it what tables in the database to use. The file has a fair amount of comments, a lot of it is notes from langer to himself, what he probley used to re-write the code for EPA 3.x - the commercial version.

Sorry, without spending a day or two creating a DIY or howto, and figuring out everything (maybe rewriting it myself, just not very likely at this point in time), I am limited in what I can provide insctrution wise here. Since we are mainly concerned about uploading product info in batches, enmass, we are looking at the upload section. The download area is probley best left alone for now, and the froogle section is dated, and handled by other modules now days.

For all of those interested, line 1806 of the unmodified code, version 1.2.5.4, is the start of adding categories to the store

[johnd]

Images not displaying after upload of EP.

I uploaded about 50 items today and most of the images didn't display on the site.

Here is my process:

• uploaded all images to store/images
• created my EP spreadsheet using filenames that I uploaded
• uploaded my EP spreadsheet
• admin message indicated all items uploaded successfully
• opened store to view the products that were uploaded
• less than half had images
• I checked to make sure that the case was correct on filenames
• went to admin-->catalog-->cat/prod-->product; all products had correct image filenames
• so, I had to use admin to load images to products individually

Is this EP shortcoming?

Thanks

[awev]

Hello JohnD,
No, it is not. EP does check to see if you have the images where you claim they are, and if it doesn't find the image then it uses a flag to tell itself to leave the image field blank, and then Zen Cart uses it's default of No Image image.

In my case I was trying to upload the file before I had the images in the proper directory, in my case, /images/wop/All, and so it wasn't seeing them. The race was on then to see if I could finish uploading all of the images before I finished feeding it the differant files.

I was able to execute a SQL command from the MySQL patch tool in the admin area to take the item name and create the entry for the image location. It was

'UPDATE zen_products SET products_image=CONCAT('wop/All/', products_image, '.jpg') WHERE products_image='noimage.gif'

This saved me a lot of time from the manual entry (only because it was taking too long - I did start out doing it that way). And please note I left out the '/store location/image/' part, as Zen Cart always expects to find images there for products, and so will supple the parent directories when retriving the images.

As to why your images did not appear I can only guess. The first thing is that windoze is not case sensitive, while *nixes are. Next would be the extention, gif, jpg, pnp, tif, etc. Gif is not the same as jpg, and yet in my case I have both image types for the item. If I had the hard disk space on my host's systems then I would use the gif for the small image and jpg for regular and large, yet that may prove to be a problem in that the extentions are differant. The final thing is you could of tried to refresh the page, or clear the browser's cache.

On some sites where I post auction listings, and use a bulk upload tool, it takes a while for them to create thumb nails from my images to display next to the listing, in the general area, yet if someone clicks on the listing they see the actual picture I uploaded. Zen Cart should be better, yet that may be happening as well. And once the thumb nail (or small image if you will) is created Zen Cart can cache them for the most popular listings.

Hope I shed some insight onto the matter for you, and maybe helped you figure out what may of been happening.

[johnd]

Hope I shed some insight onto the matter for you, and maybe helped you figure out what may of been happening.

Thanks Awev -- perhaps it is the timing that you mentioned. I'll check that on my next upload.