Google Base Feeder Support Thread [OLD]

[numinix]

V1.6.2 GOOGLE BASE FEEDER

1. Reverted back to zen_get_products_actual_price to support both specials and sale pricing;
2. Added ability to select top-level, bottom-level or full-path for product_type attribute;
3. Removed downloads and added music, downloads, free-shipping product types to _product.xml feed;
- feed=products and feed=documents;

This addresses both issues brought forward by BlessIsaacola which were the missing products that didn't fall into any of the feed types (music, free downloads) and the & issue.

It also solves the issues of bumba000 and now allows you to select the product_type category level as well as use the sales price/specials price/regular price for each product.

Finally, this update also includes the ability to set a starting and stopping point for the feed. For example, if you set the feed to start at 50, it will start at the 50th acceptable product. What this means is, if you've set restrictions, it will start at the 50th product had there been no starting point set. So if you want one feed with 1000 products starting from the beginning, set starting point to default (0) and max-products to 1000. To create another feed with the next 1000 products, set the starting point to 1001 and leave max-products at 1000.

Other Numinix Technology News:

I've added a link to the top of the downloads section so that Zen Cart members can subscribe to updates to the downloads section. Now you'll never miss a new module or bug fix! Simply click on the large RSS icon in the category description, or use the link from the footer.

[BlessIsaacola]

V1.6.2 GOOGLE BASE FEEDER

1. Reverted back to zen_get_products_actual_price to support both specials and sale pricing;
2. Added ability to select top-level, bottom-level or full-path for product_type attribute;
3. Removed downloads and added music, downloads, free-shipping product types to _product.xml feed;
- feed=products and feed=documents;

This addresses both issues brought forward by BlessIsaacola which were the missing products that didn't fall into any of the feed types (music, free downloads) and the & issue.

It also solves the issues of bumba000 and now allows you to select the product_type category level as well as use the sales price/specials price/regular price for each product.

Finally, this update also includes the ability to set a starting and stopping point for the feed. For example, if you set the feed to start at 50, it will start at the 50th acceptable product. What this means is, if you've set restrictions, it will start at the 50th product had there been no starting point set. So if you want one feed with 1000 products starting from the beginning, set starting point to default (0) and max-products to 1000. To create another feed with the next 1000 products, set the starting point to 1001 and leave max-products at 1000.

Other Numinix Technology News:

I've added a link to the top of the downloads section so that Zen Cart members can subscribe to updates to the downloads section. Now you'll never miss a new module or bug fix! Simply click on the large RSS icon in the category description, or use the link from the footer.

Numinix,
I have not tested this but I wanted to thank you for this release especially for all the fixes and the new features introduced. I guess it's time for those of us who haven't contribute to start making contribution because this takes a lot of time.

I will report back after testing this release if I run into any issues.

[numinix]

Isaac,

You are very welcome

[tj1]

I just upgraded to 1.6.2 and the file being generated is much smaller than what was generated before.

The older file had 381689 lines and was 20MB.
The file generated now has only 121776 lines and is 6.3MB. It's missing a lot of items. Is this normal, perhaps a bug?


Another question, I only started using this mod starting with version 1.6, reading some of the previous posts, I think I deduct the mod use to generate a tab delimited text file before, is this correct? If so, what was the last version to use the tab delimited text files?
I couldn't get this mod generate a valid file for one of my sites so I've done a few minor edits to easypopulate to correspond with Google Base new attribute names and it works just fine.
I kind of like tab delimited files better, smaller size and easy to manipulate using a spreadsheet program.

[numinix]

Anything before v1.5 (1.3 to 1.4) uses tab delimited, v1.5 uses XML, and v1.6 creates multiple files based on product_type.

I'm not sure why your products are missing, I would need more details about why that product would be left out? How is it different from the ones that were included?

[tj1]

I have three websites, this mod worked on two of them, but on one of them Google gave the following error.

Error Bad data Line #6
We found a mismatched XML tag. - help

This is what line 6 has for this file:

<description>Sells fine solid gold jewelry.</description>r-jewelry.com/images/large/gld/r3248_LRG.jpg</g:image_link>

There are obviously broken tags on this line. I wasn't able to figure out why this happened. This was with v1.6.0 and 1.6.1.
I just tried v1.6.2 and I no longer have the problem reported above; however, now the file generated is missing more than half the items.

I'll wait and see if anyone else has this issue or if it could be an issue on my server.

BTW, do you have a link where I can download the last version that created tab delimited files. Old links in this thread don't seem to work. I'd like to take a look at it and see if I can integrate some of its features to EasyPopulate.

[numinix]

You can find older versions in the Zen Cart Downloads section of this website.

You still haven't said what is different about the missing products. Perhaps they were inactive, some custom product type, etc.

The Google Base Feeder only supports the 5 product types found in Zen Cart by default. To add additional customized product types, you would add the following line to the SQL query for your feed type:

OR p.products_type = # 

Where # is the product_type id.

[tj1]

Thanks, I found and downloaded the older versions.

There's is nothing different about the missing products. They're all general products.

Actually, after opening the file generated I'm seeing it's missing the the closing tags as well, so this might indicate a time out, correct?

[numinix]

Yes, it's timing out then.

[TonyBenedetti]

Some of our product names include a percent sign -- e.g., "100% Kona Coffee (1 Pound Bag)". That percent sign is important to our "branding" ... no blend of beans grown other than on the Kona Coast of the Big Island of Hawaii may use the "100% Kona Coffee" appellation.

But the percent sign (which shows up just fine on our Zen Cart pages) disappears from the XML file which we send to Google Base. BTW, the same "disappearing act" is true of the Windows Live Product Search file. We aren't using the Yahoo feeder, but I would guess that similar code is used there as well.

I tried to look at the code but I must admit that my eyes glazed over when I got to the "sanitizer" function.

Numinix, is there a chance that you could look at the Google / Live (and Yahoo!) code to see if the percent signs could be preserved in the output? Or, perhaps, is there a workaround that I should use in the original ZC product entries?

We really need those little percent sign devils to show up in the product search results.

TIA