I searched the forum but couldn't find this issue addressed. I apologize in advance if my Boolean skills have failed.
I am using Zen Cart v1.3.9h and Easy Populate v1.2.5.4 in both cases, right out of the box with no modifications beyond a custom template.
First let me tell you how I proceeded (in case you're interested in the "bugs" I encountered) and then I'll get to the real reason I'm posting.
Everything was working fine in the store, including manual category creation and product entry and a five product, 3 category test run of EP yielded perfect results. YAY! :clap:
OK, so despite warnings against it, I tried to EP a 6500 product file which was on the server in the /temp directory - without splitting the file. My browser window went blank and sat that way until I hit the back button 15 mins later. Nothing was populated. No errors, just the blank screen (Firefox 3.6.13 on Windoze Vista). Yes, I knew it was a foolish attempt, but I figured I'd start with the lazy method first and then move on.
Next, I told it to auto-split the file at the default 300 products each. I got 22 files after another session of "white-sceen" (the browser is just blank. no "waiting for..." no "busy" icon, just "done" as if it meant to load a blank. ANYWAY, it split the file just fine and I then proceeded to manually populate the store using each of the 22 files. It went perfectly and I was quite pleased with the result. At first...
The source file (a tab-delimited file generated from Excel) was huge: 6500 unique products. I massaged it myself from a less than perfect source, but I was confident that despite some inevitable clean-up within the store, the data fit the requirements and limitations as set forth by EP instructions and Wiki and everywhere else I looked. However, when I looked at the total products actually populated, the store only reported 6000! 500 fewer than it should have been. EP gave no error messages, there was nothing obviously wrong anywhere so I was at a loss.
I made a download of the store's inventory using EP and compared it to the original file to see what I might find out about the products that were not populated. I expected a clerical error, but couldn't find a single thing wrong with any of them. Nothing! I tried a small sample file with just the "broken" prods and a couple good ones and they still wouldn't load, while the good ones did. I noticed then that the categories for these "bad" prods were also not created. Was that the trouble? I tried manually creating those categories and it went flawlessly... except for one detail: their names were truncated.
What seems to have happened is that when EP gets a category that has a name longer than 32 chars, it skips the category and product and moves on. That would be all well and good, since I should (?) have known to keep the category names 32 chars or less, but there was no error message from EP. Nothing. I could see if EP truncated the name automatically and then it would be up to me to clean it up, OR give me an error message (and even create a "fail-file" where it dumps all prods not able to be populated), but to just ignore them and move on was kind of lousy.
Don't get me wrong, I LOVE that fact that EP was created (THANK YOU!) and perhaps the latest-and-greatest version will address this, but PLEASE OH PLEASE at the very least include a comment in the wiki or other instruction manual that category names MUST be 32 chars or less. I didn't have to work too hard to figure it out, but I could see a lot of people getting really frustrated by this - something that could be avoided quite easliy.
Thanks for listening and thanks again for a great contribution!
