Adding products from a database

[Greg Dallamore]

Hi all,

I know this is a subject covered many times over, but having sifted through all of various threads on this forum and the various pages of the help pages, AUG etc I could do with a little guidance.

I currently manually enter and update my products within V8 Business and have reached the point where I must move to linking to a database.

The only problem I see arrises in my site layout.

I use a section per product so that I can have a product "in focus" page stemming from a master page. Typically this would look like this in terms of steps from the home page:

Home > Manufacturer > Range > Individual product

See www.bathsource.co.uk to see this working if needed.

Is it possible to link to an external database with this page per product layout? In particualr is it possible to do so whereby these sections would be created if not already present.

If not linking to a database, is it possible to do this via an import from an excel spreadsheet etc?

Hope you can help and sorry to be going over what is probably very simple, sadly right now that's how I feel.

Thanks,

Greg.

[Jan]

Linking doesn't really support product creation, if you add a new product to your external database it will appear in Actinic but in a section at the end of your tree called unlinked external data. Actinic willl only put it into a section for you if the product already exists on the database and you have asked it to automatically link products were possible.

I would suggest that you generate a flat import file from your external data that creates the products in their own section, import this and then use external linking to keep the products up to date.

Linking doesn't support components, attributes and choices either, so you might want to generate import files for these from your external database as well.

It's not easy by the way, external linking, it's actually quite a tricky thing to set up (in my opinion anyway). Once it is setup though it will just work.

Regards,

[Greg Dallamore]

Hi Jan,

Thanks for your help - certainly helps me focus my efforts so rgeatly appreciated.

Thanks again.