Actinic <-> Actinic export / import

[eighteentee]

Hi all,

I've just been given the task of trying to modify and sort out a customers Actinic catalog. I've imported their snapshot without too much pain but it's largely unusable and really needs to be started afresh as it started life in v4 and has been upgraded all the way up to 9. The result isn't pretty, hence the need to sort it out.

I've tried exporting from the client snapshot as a hierarchical file and importing into a fresh blank Catalog but that doesn't work. When I say it 'doesn't work' it actually goes ahead and 'looks' like it's worked, i.e. happy tick boxes against everything but in the product tree, it simply says 'online catalog' with no section or products or anything else in there.

Is this is right way to do it or can I bring in the database, sans design elements, into a fresh, blank catalog?

[Rich Brady]

Have you tried:

File | Export | Catalog

and then import that file into a fresh site?

[eighteentee]

Have you tried:

File | Export | Catalog

and then import that file into a fresh site?

Yep, that's what I was trying to do, litterally export from one and import into the other. Which seems to fail. Miserably.

[Mark H]

How about importing the whole thing as a snapshot then dropping a clean CSS layout theme on it?

[eighteentee]

How about importing the whole thing as a snapshot then dropping a clean CSS layout theme on it?

The main problem is that because the templates have come across from older versions of Actinic they're all table-based which means they're full of presentational markup and general nastiness that prevents you being able to just 'switch off' the styles and start afresh.

Actually applying one of the clean CSS templates has hardly any affect.

[eighteentee]

OK, so I was up until 2.30am this morning trying to get this to work and it's a big-fat-NO. Not happening. Nada. Nowt. Zip.

Plan B: Is it possible to just bring across the database SANS all the presentational guff in order to work with a standard, base template? OR is there another way?

[Duncan Rounding]

Export the product catalog , clean it up and only import the minimum of fields required. In other words exclude all the references to the layouts etc. Then when you catalog again into the new site it should pick up the default layouts etc instead.

[eighteentee]

Export the product catalog , clean it up and only import the minimum of fields required. In other words exclude all the references to the layouts etc. Then when you catalog again into the new site it should pick up the default layouts etc instead.

Hi Duncan,

Just looking at this csv with all it's 12k+ rows and thinking this really is far too much 'manual hacking' in order to make it work.

[edit]

Just tried again with a fresh export and it looked like everything was ok with the exception of a few errors:

Line 20: The selected image file does not exist.
Line 23: The selected image file does not exist.
Line 58: An invalid Section could not be imported. All child items will be skipped as well.
Line 58: The selected image file does not exist.
Line 371: An invalid Section could not be imported. All child items will be skipped as well.
Line 371: The selected image file does not exist.
Line 4761: An invalid Section could not be imported. All child items will be skipped as well.
Line 4761: The selected image file does not exist.
Line 8120: An invalid Section could not be imported. All child items will be skipped as well.
Line 8120: The selected image file does not exist.

I've looked at the CSV and there's nothing outstanding about those lines where it's mentioning an 'invalid section'.

?

[Mark H]

Looking at the lines, is it simply that the section image is missing, ie not where it is defined to be?

[eighteentee]

Looking at the lines, is it simply that the section image is missing, ie not where it is defined to be?

<scratch="head">Clearly there's something that Actinic is generating in the export that's causing grief on the import.</scratch>

[AndyBorrett]

If you are familiar with Access you can use a few Querys to extract most of the information you need, export it to Excel then import it back into Actinic.

In the past I have exported to CSV then used Excels sort functions to get all the product information together then deleted everything else. You can then do a flat file import back into Actinic

Just noticed the previous post - if you don't have Images where Actinic thinks they should be then you Will get the errors you describe

[NormanRouxel]

The selected image file does not exist.

Quich fix is to edit the file in Notepad (or download the much better open source Notepad++) , look for these line numbers (they'll begin "Section") and remove any image filenames.

[Chunkford]

It could be that they were wrong in the old site to being with.
I've come across a situation where someone has deleted the images in windows, but it was still linked in Actinic. So when i imported the details into a new site, errors came up.
Also Actinic wont alert you until you click on the section/product and click off it.

Just so it's clear, are the images that the errors refer to defiantly there?

[eighteentee]

It could be that they were wrong in the old site to being with.
I've come across a situation where someone has deleted the images in windows, but it was still linked in Actinic. So when i imported the details into a new site, errors came up.
Also Actinic wont alert you until you click on the section/product and click off it.

Just so it's clear, are the images that the errors refer to defiantly there?

A *BIG* problem is that the vast majority of the images were living in various places on the customers hard drive, i.e. some in My Documents, some in My Pictures, others even on the desktop. I always thought you had to keep the images together with the SITE folder.

[eighteentee]

Quich fix is to edit the file in Notepad (or download the much better open source Notepad++) , look for these line numbers (they'll begin "Section") and remove any image filenames.

Thanks Norman - I'll give it a bash. And BTW I use Notepad++ when I'm using windows as it's simply the BEST text editor there is. How it's free is beyond me! Not quite as good as Coda on Mac but definately a lot better than most of the other rubbish out there.