Easy Populate 1.2.5.4 support

[Scrat]

SilverFoxUnlimited - Good to hear that all's well now, one word of advice make your file uploads smaller, keep to approx. 500 items/products per file and you should find less problems with EP.

[sinke]

Hi everybody ! Greetings to you all, very useful board and great community.

This is my first post, and first time I'm working with zen cart software.
Following your advice I've installed easy populate 1.2.5.4 on Zen Cart v1.3.7.1 and I've managed to do my first successful upload of EP File.

But I have a little problem. Although upload of new products and update of the DataBase is completely successful, I always get this massage at the end of the report: No model field in record. This line was not imported.

I'm thinking that maybe easy populate reads one more row after the last product and produces this massage for it.
Should I worry about this massage.

One more question is it posible to enter meta tags/keywords with easy populate ?

Thank You !

[Scrat]

sinke -

No model field in record. This line was not imported.

Don't worry about this, you probably have a '\n' (Newline) at the end of the last row so EP is trying to import that line but of cause there is no model field.

One more question is it posible to enter meta tags/keywords with easy populate ?

Not at this time with EP 1.2.5.4 but I think with EP Advance (Not Free) you maybe able, but you would need to check with the authors website.

[dealbyethan.com]

The website for Easy Populate Advanced support seems dead. I have 2 questions hopefully someone is able to give advice.

1. How do we import multiple product images for each product? At the moment, I only know how to insert one image for one product using EPA.
2. I have a product which I want to put in a second category. Usually I do this by copying the product as "Link Product" so that when I make changes to the product in the first category, the same product in the second category will be updated. How do I use EPA to do this?

Please let me know. Thanks in advance.

[Scrat]

dealbyethan.com -

1. Nothing to do with EP really,
For additional Images :-

• laptop.jpg
• laptop_backview.jpg ( add '_****' to the image name of the product for additonal Images)
• laptop_sideview.jpg

And ftp these to your server in the right images folder.

2. Not with EP 1.2.5.4, don't know with EP Adanced

[Phil020782]

2. I have a product which I want to put in a second category. Usually I do this by copying the product as "Link Product" so that when I make changes to the product in the first category, the same product in the second category will be updated. How do I use EPA to do this?

Not sure about easy populate advanced but with standard EP if you copy all the information to a new row in the spreadsheet with the exact same model number and change just the catagory, EP will insert it as a linked product making the original entry the master.

[dealbyethan.com]

Excellent. If it works for Easy Populate Standard, it should work for the Advanced too. Thank you.

[kairen]

I still haven't figured this one out.

For some reason, my EP tab delimited did create the right categories groups from the list file, but no products were ever added to the DB.

Same file without categories worked earlier, but it crashed every product in the main category, or whatever the category which holds the categories is called.

Once I edited and sorted some products out in the list to see if it would sort them out the right way ( I have categories depth of 3, and I removed the products from DB in between so as not to duplicate them, though EP is supposed to replace them[!?!] ) and uploaded, it created the right product groups and product subcategories under my first categorie (manufacturer/provider), but it didn't add any products.

It looked like it was working properly, but at the last line of my list it says
"|||||||||||||||
ERROR 3"

categories yes
products no



Anyways, I consulted with my father (whose shop I'm building) and we decided to leave those for later, so now I have added a couple other manufacturers with less than 100 products manually, because of my frustration at EP.

Still the 6500 products are waiting in my lists and backed up lists till I have edited the content and layout. Also, I wonder if the multilinguality of the shop will affect EP, or if it will just add the product description as they are into the default language (my case finnish) without being affected by my having 3 or 4 descriptions for each?

[Scrat]

kairen - the usual problem with EP issues is the user is just not importing the right data in the right columns.

If you could attach a file example or an example of a row this would help us...

the most common issue is that the model number/ref has to be unique to that one product.

The best way to test any imports is set up a product in Zencart add attributes etc and then download the complete file and the attribute file and then open them in OO or Excel and see the structure/format. Then just copy the first product row as an example and add additional products ( with unique model ref's) and then import and I would put money on it it would just work great (Version 1.2.5.4 and 3 )
Also read this FAQ below it does work

Hello folks,
I will see about creating an EP FAQ in the future, but not now, I have to get my sites up and going first.

First, to answer a couple questions that keep popping up.

Q. What versions of Easy Populate (EP) are currently available?
A. The stable free version is 1.2.5.4, the buggy free version is 2.75, and the paid version is Easy Populate Advance (EPA) 3.03 - as of this writing on 7/28/07

Q. Can I have EP add product categories for me?
A. The non-commercial versions can, the paid version can not.

Q. Can EP upload special fields?
A. All three can, just that with EPs you have to edit the file, while it seems as if EPA has the support built in.

Q. I have uploaded 15 products, yet only 2 show up. The file looks something similar to this:
Quote:
book | book.jpg | First book | ... |EOREOR
book | book.jpg | Second book | ... | EOREOR
...
dvd | dvd.jpg | 1st dvd | ... | EOREOR
dvd | dvd.jpg | 2nd dvd | ... | EOREOR
Why am I only seeing two items?
A. Each row must have a unique product model (i.e., item number), and the end of record EOREOR must be on the end of each row. If you change it from book to book_1, book_2, etc, then EP will insert the items. Failure to do so will have EP insert the first item, book, and then each additional occurrence of book updates the first, same thing with dvd in this example.

Q. After uploading I find only a few records uploaded correctly, and there are a few others with a number of records all in the last field. What happened?
A. Did you remember to place EOREOR on the end of each row/record?

Tip: You may want to turn off "Text delimited with quotes" in both your spreadsheet (i.e., Excel and Open Office Calc) and the database you are using. May I suggest the tide "~" symbol if you must use something as a text delimiter (i.e, you have a few commas , single or double quotes, in your description, and want to preserve them). The tide symbol can be stripped off and out as needed. If, for example, you import a great amount of data using the LOAD DATA INFILE command in MySQL you can use the option FIELDS OPTIONALLY ENCLOSED BY '~' to remove it.

Tip: See the above post for an updated sql script for installing on systems that use MySQL version 5.x

About me: I have used, and modified, version 2.75 in the past. I have downloaded, but not installed, version 1.2.5.4 If people are interested I can download a copy of 2.75 from my site (computer crashed so I don't have a local copy), and post it here. I have been playing with computers for over two decades. I understand some coding, and can do a bad, yet working, hack if I have to, just don't ask me to re-work Zen Cart for your needs . I will take a fresh look at both EP versions and see what I can do to make them more user friendly, or at least create instructions on how you can do it yourself (a DIY guild if you will). Again, this may not be for a while as I have my daytime job and then my two web sites to worry about.

[kairen]

seems so clear now...thx.... I guess the mistake is that I thougth the v-products_model was like a product number and put the REAL model as model number, but it contains letters so it won't work that way?
(might seem clear but by now on a friday night noone knows)

It stands for products_id?

no worries, there's time to get those 6500 prods up since the page doesn't work yet either