Adding new seasons products

[SolSearcher]

It's that time again! I have about 200 products to add with between 5 and 8 hidden products for stock control on sizes.
I always just put my head down and plough on with Actinic crashing occassionaly during the product adding process.
Would this process be better for me if I was to use a "heirarchical file" and is there a tutorial for this?

[leehack]

Hierarchicals or try the product options wizard available when you have a product selected, make sure you input stock levels and it will create the hidden products for you.

[SolSearcher]

Thanks Lee, is there a tutorial for the heirarchical method?
I will have to replicate some products for another one of my sites, one site is running V8 the other v10.

[Duncan Rounding]

I don't think there are any tutorials around explaining hierarchical importing apart from what's in the Actinic help.

Manually create a sample product of the type you want then export your catalog, open it in Excel and you will see the structure of the file.

[SolSearcher]

Thanks Duncan, I'll get some products done this weekend. Is the process reliable for versions 8 and 10 of Actinic?

[Duncan Rounding]

I have been using hierarchical import files for years with no real problems. Just remember to backup first and compact regularly.

[SolSearcher]

Hierarchicals for new products

I posted this question some time ago about Hierarchicals. Basiclly I have a shed load of products to add to my site.
In the past (v8) I have copied a product that has the correct settings (hidden products, component and choices) and have just changed the name and reference numbers (to unique), then in the permutations I've linked up the new references and then changed the image paths and updated for SEO. This method has been fairly quick and problem free.
I now have V10 and cannot reproduce this way of working. I have tried Hierarchicals but it's doing my head in.
My products all follow the same format could somebody make up a template for me, I don't mind paying a small fee.

[feemish]

Hi Jay,

I know how heirarchicals look on first glance, but honestly, theyre not that bad... I had to do exactly what you want to do recently... for a whole shop.

As duncan says..
If you start from an empty shop and create (in actinic) one product, with all the componants, attributes, choices, hidden products all set up as you want them for all the products... Then export this.. you will see how the heirarchical file works...
Once you suss that you can work on copying and pasting this 'master' product.
and then go back and edit the detail...

So take an exported heirarchical file with just one product..
Just look down the first column to start with..
after all the brochure gumpf (header / content / brochure)
you'll see a row called (section) which is the name of the first section.. believe it or not..

For ease of geting your head round it.. for the time being erase everything above this row (section)
From (section) on is the products data...

(product) the first product
the (componant) then (attribute) of the product
then its (choices) and (permutations)
then come the hidden products listed simply as another (product)

Just get your head around that.. look how it all links together.. its not as bad as it first looks..

[GolfGripsDirect]

Once you understand the layout of the hierarchical file adding new products and sections from it becomes a breeze. I would add though that i've had trouble (and read of other people too) importing a hierchical file that i've edited in Excel 2007. Using Excel 2003 however works like a charm!

Rob

[SolSearcher]

Error in the first line

I now have a stripped down a comma seperated heirarchical file and can see how it's laidout.

I have deleted everything above the 1st Section.

I have copied and pasted the original product and changed the relevent reference codes and names so I now have 2 products.

I have saved the file and tried to import it into the test site, I selected update not replace but I get an error on the first line and the file won't import.

Should I be keeping all the information in above the Section entry or is it that I'm saving the file in the wrong way?

[GolfGripsDirect]

I'm looking after my 10 month old son so progress is slow, next step saving the file as excel 2003 this might help.

Or will I need a copy of Excel 2003?

I'm pretty sure you can only import csv (or tab delimited) type files so unfortunately saving as excel 2003 wouldn't work because you couldn't import this file!

Try making one change to a section name, resaving the .csv and importing that - from my understanding excel 2007 handles csv's a little strangely and any csv export (even without changes) that I re-saved in 2007 would not import.

I've read about a fix by ensuring the last column on the spreadsheet does not contain empty fields but i've not had any luck with this, however in Excel 2003 all works as it should. Someone might be able to recommend some other csv editors.

Rob

[SolSearcher]

Just so I know I'm not barking up the wrong tree from the start, I have a screen shot of my csv file with the new product added. Is this how a file should look before being imported?
I'm using office 2010 so I'm proberbly really buggered.

[NormanRouxel]

I have deleted everything above the 1st Section.

That won't work. A hierarchical file starts with assorted Header,.... lines that describe the type of data lines that follow and the fields contained in them.

So if you file only contained Sections and Products, you'd need at least these two Header lines. More if you've Components, Attributes, Choices, etc.

[GolfGripsDirect]

Just so I know I'm not barking up the wrong tree from the start, I have a screen shot of my csv file with the new product added. Is this how a file should look before being imported?
I'm using office 2010 so I'm proberbly really buggered.

As norman said those first few lines are rather important! I'm not sure how Excel 2010 will fare, best way to check is to do a fresh export, change nothing other than one of your section titles, save this as a csv and then try importing it into actinic.

Also, a friendly reminder to snapshot religiously!

[Duncan Rounding]

Some things I've learnt over time...

1. Do not open the csv file by double clicking on it's icon. If you have any fields that have leading zeros such as the product reference then they will be removed and your reference will be wrong. Rather open Excel and then import the data from text file and then set all columns to type of text first.
2. Delete the empty row just below the header lines. This often causes problems by getting filled with commas.
3. Add a new column to the very right of the very last column in the header. Just type 'dummy' in the very first row of this column and drag it all the way down to the last line of the sheet. When importing just ignore any mapping for this column.
4. Add a temporary column at the very left side and then fill it with a running number from 1 to the last row of the sheet. This allows you to sort and filter to do bulk changes and then sort the rows back into their original order. Delete this column before saving as CSV.

There's more, but these may help.