Excel Populate problem with slow connections

HI

I have a small problem with excel populate when the connection is slow. It duplicates the import and I then have to go and physically remove large amounts of products which takes hours.

For the moment I have worked around this by creating multiple import files with no more than 20 records each but this is also time consuming and I would appreciate a permanent fix.

The site is selling photographs of events and I add about 600 new products each week.

Regards

John

What module are you using? I have not heard of "EXCEL populate".

This one:

http://www.zen-cart.com/index.php?main_page=product_contrib_info&products_id=1820

Regards

That's new... thanks for the link.

I might give it a try on a DEV site.

I have therefore not used it so I can't comment. I do know that in the Easy Populate module, it is possible to first FTP the file to the server, then command it to load off that file. In this way, there is not transit of data over the WWW.

Does this new module have a feature allowing you to first load the file to the server, then populating the dbase from there?

Thanks, it's really cool and works nicely except for the small bug.

It only loads from an uploaded file. You cannot populate directly from a local file.

I see what you're getting at though, and I also can't understand that if all of the processing is being done remotely that it should behave like this.

What happens is that the page times out and you get a blank page with an error dialogue that says the page has timed out with 2 options - retry or cancel. I though it was because I had pressed retry the first time it happened, so the next time it happened I pressed cancel but it still duplicated the records.

When my connection is quick though, it works very well first time round with hundreds of records. Problem is that I am on domestic broadband so in the evenings and weekends it can be slow.

A tip for when you're using it. The id label in the top left corner of the spreadsheet needs to be changed to PPL or the populate doesn't work and it returns a blank page. Very frustrating until you read the documentation carefully.

What I do is I create the new category first. Then I use the facility to create a file based on my new empty category. This provides the correctly formatted and complete spreadsheet with no products.

I have a script using Imagemagick that resizes and watermarks my images and while stepping though the images in the folder, it also creates a csv file with the entries. I copy the csv entries into a spreadsheet and upload. Makes the job quick and error free. The new images are uploaded into the appropriate folder (set in the script before running). The only other setting required in the script before it's run is the Category.

If you like I can send a copy of the script.

Regards