hierarchical import caused major error

[fatoftheland]

Hi all...

Only Friday I was patting actinic on the back, i must have spoken to soon!

Ok, been trying to update product layouts by exporting hierarchical data editing it in excel and reimporting. The original products have been imported from a flat csv and the export works fine, however reimporting the hierarchical file causes lots of errors, for example:

Line 9: The record did not have a matching header line to specify the fields in the record.

Line 28: The record did not have a matching header line to specify the fields in the record.

Line 29: The record did not have a matching header line to specify the fields in the record.

Line 2985: An invalid Section could not be imported. All child items will be skipped as well.

Line 2985: The specified file name conflicts with another file name!
Please enter a unique (ignoring case) file name.

Often another errors occurs, this usually relates the number of fields in a line of the files being too short: Expected 40 fields but only found 38. This I think may be down to not enough commas or tabs (tried csv and tab delimited .txt)

This morning I deleted some of the sections the erroneous hierarchical file produced. This has now caused actinic to crash everytime it trys to start, see the attached image.

Any Ideas?

[Jan]

If you are using excel to edit the file you need to add a dummy column to the end that has a value in every row (and then just ignore this column) otherwise excel will remove blank columns from the end of the rows and cause these problems to occur.

Regards,

[fatoftheland]

ok thanks for the heads up on that Jan, it's been a while since i've done hierarchical imports, I think I recall this from before....

Shame actinic wont work now to try it out!!

[jsavoor]

Hi Jan

I am at a loss as to where the LAST COL is. Row 1 has X number of cols. Row 2 has more. Where does one add this column and fill it from. From Row 1?

I have attached a sample xls catalog file for your assitance.

Jay

[Jan]

It is tricky with hierarchical data, perhaps you could edit it with something that isn't excel, other than that you should add an extra column after the last column on each type of row, not easy I know, sorry.

Regards,

[fatoftheland]

To edit in excel I removed the 3 blank extra rows actinic puts in (after the header rows and brochure pages)

Then navigate to the last column in row 2 (this should be the longest row) then move to the column to the left and then up to the top row, name the column "DummyColumn" and fill all the way down to last row containing data with zeros. This should fix the import issues caused by excel.

[jsavoor]

Thanks Guys. Will try today and let you know if I have any problems.