Proper procedure to import new products

[nileshpa]

Does anyone know a proper/neater procedure to import new products that contains attributes, components, permutations etc.

I'm in the shoe trade & every season i.e. 6 months or so, we receive new styles. I take a brand at a time, create a hierarchical file containing basic info of the Actual products (hidden) for stock control, a master product for each style/colour combination which will have attribute of Size, choices & permutation.

Whenever this gets loaded, Actinic either hangs, crashes or fails with database errors. Can't do much until I've compacted it a number of times, either via Actinic & using MS Access directly. At times, its so bad, I have to restore from my original backup & start again. Don't think its number of products as I've reduced it from 12K to 7K by removing old styles or sizes I've sold out of and no longer stock. Once it gets going, its fine , but its very frustrating till then.

Any help would be much appreciated.
Nilesh

[AndyBorrett]

Pretty much the same thing happens every time I do an import. I find compacting the database then restarting Actinic before doing the import helps a little. Obviously, make sure all your images are in Place before doing the import.

[nileshpa]

Thanks Andy for the reply.
I do like the idea of compacting prior to the import. Will give it a shot.

At this point, there are no images or logos brought in. Its simply the very basic definitions like name, description & the actual matrix structure. Only after a successful load, do I manually update the master products with images, logos, price, custom variables, etc. to make it presentable to the end user. BTW - None of this info is put onto the hidden products, simply to reduce data on the database.
Rgds

[nileshpa]

Took your advice, Andy. i.e Compressing the DB before importing.

Can't say whether it worked or not, but must have helped at least.
Took 4 attempts to finally get the products loaded only to find they should have gone one more section-level in. i.e. its visible at brand level and if I hide the section, none of the other fragments will be able to pick up the products via blockif statements. I've now decided to precreate the inner section & move a few products at a time taking frequent backups & compressing the DB in-between. A week to bring just one brand in. Very Frustrating & annoying - maybe thats what Actinic stands for. Surely there must be a better way to do this.

[AndyBorrett]

Dont know if it will help in your case but I try to keep everything as simple as possible. I import everything into a temp section which is hidden on the website before dragging each one out to where it is supposed to be.

[nileshpa]

I use to do something similar, but when I tried to move the products into the right sections, it use to either crashed or hung-up. The on restart, I realised the relevant data is lost. So I now try to import directly under brand/<brandname> and use fragments with blockifs to display the products under relevant sections. Much easier & no need to move anything around.

[Peter S]

Have a word with Andy Barrow at codepath.biz and see what they can do for you. They have experience in creating software that imports fields and non standard fields directly into the Actinic database from an external database.

Peter

[nileshpa]

Thanks Peter. I'll give them a call.
Regards, Nilesh

[Confused Sally]

I import everything into a temp section which is hidden on the website before dragging each one out to where it is supposed to be.

I am just playing with v11 but it seems to have disabled drag and drop completely - so how are you doing it?

[AndyBorrett]

I see from your other thread that you have sorted out the drag and drop problem. Sorry I didn't respond earlier.