Apsona ShopAdmin - a free tool for import/mass update/reporting

lankeeyankee - Thanks for your comments. It is easy to verify what ShopAdmin is doing. First, you can look at the PHP code, which is clear text. Second, you can open up Firebug in Firefox (or HttpFox or HttpWatch or your tool of choice) and watch the traffic from your browser. You will see that there are two servers to which traffic flows: Your own server and shopadmin-svc.apsona.com. If you open up the packets that flow to the latter server, you will see that the only information it contains is logging data indicating what table was accessed and what operation was performed. It will not contain any data from your database. We use this logging data to improve the performance of our software, and this fact is stated in our terms of service and elsewhere on our website.

Hope this helps.

Re: uploading dozens of attributes at one tiome from a file
Simple and honest answer - I simply cant seem to work it out -
is there a tutorial or cheat sheet that would cover this;
or can you give me some hints and tips
Rufusclc

rufusclc:

Re: uploading dozens of attributes at one tiome from a file
Simple and honest answer - I simply cant seem to work it out -
is there a tutorial or cheat sheet that would cover this;
or can you give me some hints and tips
Rufusclc

Have you watched the video on the product attributes import page on our website? Does it help at all?

Looked at it but as I said I am a rank amateur and cant seem to work out how to add a list a items from an excel spreadsheet (can I s3end you an extract of the spreadsheet I am working with to illustrate my dilemma)
Rufusclc

So I have been trying to get Apsona to work. I have been able to install it, but when I click on the link in the admin section, it takes me to a page with a header and footer and nothing else. It does show my name, the store name and it has 2 links for my account and feed back which are not working. I checked the Apsona site and followed their recommendations on possible causes of this, but everything seems to be in order. I checked that the tables got added to the data base, I am using supported versions of MySQL and PHP, I am running Zen Cart 1.3.9h, on a free shared linux hosting plan through GoDaddy, though this will change once I get things to a certain point.

I have emailed support at apsona and am waiting for a response there, but I thought I would check here to see if people have been able to fix this problem and give me ideas of things I can try. I did read something about name server issues, if someone could shed a bit of light on that for me as to what I might check. Any help is certainly appreciated.

Thanks.

I just installed Zen Cart 1.3.9h and found Apsona, so I installed it and the latest update and no other mods. When I go through the product mass import (the manufacturer import worked like a charm), I get his error:

Server error:
Unknown column 'undefined' in 'where clause'
URL: apsona_svc.php?uri_offset=/delete/data/products_to_categories.js
SQL:
select products_id,categories_id from products_to_categories where products_id = undefined

Please send a screen shot to [email protected]

I sent the screen shot 2 times now over the last few days but haven't received any response, so I'm hoping to have a little better luck here on the forum.

As for other troubleshooting, I saw a post that said to use Firebug, so I did. I get this from firebug:

http://xxx.mysite.com/zencart/admin/apsona_svc.php?uri_offset=/delete/data/products_to_categories.js&parameters=%7B%22where%22%3A%22cebqhpgf_vq%20%3D%20haqrsvarq%22%7D

parameters {"where":"cebqhpgf_vq = haqrsvarq"}
uri_offset /delete/data/products_to_categories.js

{"error":"Unknown column 'undefined' in 'where clause'","sql":"select products_id,categories_id from products_to_categories where products_id = undefined"}

I'm not a coder (or at least not a good one) so I have no clue what these errors really mean or how to fix them.

This is a new store with minimal categories (of the hundreds that will be needed).

So I wondered: Am I importing in the wrong order, do I need to import the categories first? Then the products?

I tested this theory and others, still get the error....

PLEASE HELP!

Also, a HUGE THANK YOU to everyone that worked on this or any other open source tools I've used.

Apsona is helping me, I'll provide an update when I know more.

Apsona rolled out an update last night, the error change to:

Server error:
You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near ',,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,)' at line 1
URL: apsona_svc.php?uri_offset=/delete/data/products_to_categories.js
SQL:
select products_id,categories_id from products_to_categories where products_id in (,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,)

Is anyone else having this problem?

I checked MySQL version and it's: mysqlnd 5.0.7-dev - 091210 - $Revision: 304625 $

THE ISSUES ARE FIXED!!!!

I'm very happy to report 2 things:

1. Apsona's support is awesome
2. The problem was more with my version of MySQL than with the Apsona ShopAdmin

Apsona went out of their way to help me, including working at 11PM at night with me to get to the bottom of the problem.

I can't say thanks enough or how impressed I am with Apsona!

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU

I would also like to add an update to my situation. Apsona contacted me after I put in a help request on their site. They offered to do a gotomeeting session to help resolve the issue. But before we scheduled the session I switched from a free hosting account to a premium hosting account. Once all the site files and database were transfered to the new hosting plan, still with GoDaddy, Apsona started to work. So my guess is that with the free hosting account through GoDaddy there are several limitations.

I must say that I am very pleased with the Apsona software so far. It is proving to be extremely useful in getting all my products up on my site. When I started building the zen cart site, I was not looking forward to loading on all my products. Apsona has made this seem effortless compared to what I was imagining that I would be doing.

Apsona, you are good people with excellent software. Thank You.

SO far... IM in heaven!
Have been struggling no end with Easy Populate. timeout issues and download csv problems with no apparent solution..
I have a HUGE amount to products.. in the hundereds of thousands with incredibly complex Category Linking.

What used to take a frustrating hour with Easy Populate, now takes me less than 10sec to export my entire shop.

LOVING IT!

SO MUCH!

SOOOOO MUCH!

Great Job Apsona! SUPER SUPER JOB!

I love you...

( how can you tell there was frustration before? ) lol..

I can Even edit the Meta information without going into the phpMyAdmin!

YUMMIE!!!!!!!!!!

britneycook, aceproductsusa, dare197 and all the wonderful folks on this forum - thank you all for your kind words. Your encouragement is what keeps our enthusiasm going. We are delighted to see our product being of use to you, and very happy to be a part of the Zen Cart community.

Best regards.

Hello guys. Apsona is great, but I have a newbie question: How to mass delete products by uploading a CSV file through Apsona ShopAdmin?

Thanks.

vintsf - sorry for the delayed response. As yet no, you can't delete via CSV upload. This feature is on our todo list, though, so it should be available soon.

Regards.

Having loaded ShopAdmin onto my 2-language non-production Zen Cart shop (v1.3.9b), it appears to do everything I really need, and could be the answer to my prayers. Except, the multilingual support doesn't seem right.
When I create a single product, I need to be create it with names in both languages, and descriptions in both languages.
This doesn't seem possible.
When I create the product with the first language selected, I can only enter that language's details. When selecting the other language, I can't even see that product in the tool ...

What am I doing wrong?

What I need is to create a product, and enter names and descriptions at the same time for both languages, while that product keeps a single id and model number.
Point me to the right way of doing this, and then I'm sold.

thanks!

nicnet - one approach to maintaining products in multiple languages is to import each language in a separate batch.

For example, suppose your cart supports English and Spanish. Your first step would be to import the English versions of the product info: (a) choose English from the language dropdown at the top of the ShopAdmin UI, and (b) in step 2 of the import wizard, map the language-dependent fields (such as name and description) to their English versions.

Your next step would be to update via import. This time you would choose Spanish in the language selector, and in the import wizard you would choose "Update existing records". You would then map the language specific product fields to your Spanish versions, and proceed with the import.

After the first step, if you change the language selector to Spanish, you will probably not see the product records within ShopAdmin, as you indicate. But that's because ShopAdmin tries to display Spanish data and doesn't find it. That doesn't matter - simply go ahead with the update via import, and things should line up afterwards.

Hope this helps.

I found the dual language procedure complicated at first.

What needs to be stressed is:

1. IMPORT of new data (english only) : thereby creating new products.

2. Change language and then UPDATE now-existing products with the second language fields.

Hi apsona and torvista

Yes - I can get this (dual language import) to work now, based on the use of new and update.
Looking at the products and products_description tables with phpMyAdmin helped me along as well.

This seems to be me to be an extremely useful and well supported addition to my zen cart. Where is the catch? (is there one?)

Thanks a lot.

Since yesterday, I can't update my products with apsona. I do not know what might be the issue. If I choose 'update existing record', it would tell me that apsona is not responding.

poola:

Since yesterday, I can't update my products with apsona. I do not know what might be the issue. If I choose 'update existing record', it would tell me that apsona is not responding.

We've not made any updates in the last week or two, so this is unlikely to be an issue with ShopAdmin. Have you talked to your hosting service about this?