Linking to external product feeds

[djrobo]

Hi

i have a client who has two suppliers who both supply him with a feed of their products. One supplier provides a csv via ftp and the other is an xml http link.

i want to be able to link to these feeds so that they are brought into actinic. my ideal situation would be that the feeds would be updated in actinic automatically.

The problem i have is firstly actinic does not support xml and csv in linking, csv is supported in importing however, but the client would have to select the file every time they wanted to update the products and i noticed that my custom variables aren't present in the field mapping when you do an import but are present when you use external linking. so i have no choice but to use external linking as i have several custom variables that are linked to products.

my first thoughts would be to build a php script that would get both feeds and join them,format them (price to 100 for 1.00 etc) and then save the data as a csv or save them to mysql database which can be linked into actinic. but this seems very long winded.

the actinic telephone support actually mentioned doing something directly in the actinic .mde. importing them there. but it went over my head a bit and didnt want to mess with the actinic catelogue.

Im hoping there is other people who have came accross this issue and would appreciate some help and advice on how to tackle the problem.

thanks

[Jan]

You can import custom variables if you use hierarchical import rather than flat file import.

Regards,

[Duncan Rounding]

You're going to have to write some macros to hash the data into the correct format.