importing duplicates

[john harding]

I'm preparing a spreadsheet for eventual import and I'm using my own catalogue numbers, not letting Actinic generate them.

I need to include some products in more than one section, and I anticipate that Actinic won't allow it. Is there a way of doing it? Obviously I could avoid clashes by some device like adding a suffix to one of the numbers in a duplicate pair, but it seems inelegant to have numbers different from the ones that the stock bear in real life.

[leehack]

Actinic adds 1! before the prod ref on the first duplicate and then 2! on the second and so on, you could try that. Or better still create a duplicate in a section and then do an export and see how actinic handles it differently, that's the safest and best way to check. I'm pretty sure you can import duplicates, hierarchicals would screw up if not i'd imagine, particularly when someone exports, changes, imports, that process could go belly up if you couldn't.

[john harding]

I tried manually copying a product and pasting as a duplicate. The product reference was shown as the same as the original, but greyed out. As the book says, the duplicate refers back to the original, which evidently means it's a shortcut rather than a literal duplicate.

It looks to me as if the easiest thing would be for me to mark up my spreadsheet with instructions for creating duplicates manually after the import.

[john harding]

I do wish I could learn to read and retain. I see that there is a field for specifying product type as duplicate, and another to give the original product ref. I must have seen that before and forgotten it.

[Jan]

You can import duplicates, this is from the help file for flat file import :

======================================================
If you want to import duplicate products (see Duplicating Products) as part of a product import, there are a few rules you have to follow to import the duplicate data correctly.

Firstly, the product reference for the duplicate should be in the format of x!yyy, where 'x' is the instance of the duplicate (ie the first duplicate will be '1', the 2nd will be '2' etc) and 'yyy' is the original product reference. So the first duplicate of product '1234' will be 1!1234.

Note: As references cannot be more than 20 characters long, your original product references should not be more than 18 characters if using duplicates as you need the two extra characters in duplicate references.

Secondly, you will need a column in your spreadsheet for 'Original Product Reference' which needs to be mapped during the import

Finally, you should have a column in your spreadsheet for 'Product Type', where '0' is a standard product and '1' is a duplicate.

=================================================

Regards,

[tobytoby]

Yeah, so for a product called 'A Demo Product' with id 500, price £2 (ie 200 pence) and 2 duplicates the csv file would look something like this.


Header:Product,Product Reference,Short Description,Price,Product Type,Original Product Reference

Product,500,A Demo Product,200,0,,

Product,2!500,A Demo Product,200,1,500,

Product,3!500,A Demo Product,200,1,500,


ps. Note the empty final column for the original product.

[Duncan Rounding]

>Product,500,A Demo Product,200,0,,
>Product,2!500,A Demo Product,200,1,500,
>Product,3!500,A Demo Product,200,1,500,

should probably be :

Product,500,A Demo Product,200,0,,
Product,1!500,A Demo Product,200,1,500,
Product,2!500,A Demo Product,200,2,500,

because the duplicate index should be unique and I think that the prefixes usually start from 1 rather than 2

There is a slight cut and paste error above:
Product,500,A Demo Product,200,0,,
Product,1!500,A Demo Product,200,1,500,
Product,2!500,A Demo Product,200,1,500,

[Jan]

Ah, sorry, this is a heirchical file, I thought we were using a flat file and that number was the index. I'll remove that post, it's wrong.

[tobytoby]

Ooh yeah. It's better if the duplicate indices start at 1. Duno if you've used hierarchical files before, so just so you know, the first line, which starts 'Header:Product', defines what each field in a Product row stands for eg the second row stand for 'Product Reference'. So for completeness (hope I got it right this time : ):


Header:Product,Product Reference,Short Description,Price,Product Type,Original Product Reference

Product,500,A Demo Product,200,0,,

Product,1!500,A Demo Product,200,1,500,

Product,2!500,A Demo Product,200,1,500,

[john harding]

Thanks to all of the above, but I'm now slightly confused. It's a flat file I'm importing, so how much of the above applies? I'd discovered 0 and 1 for original and duplicate, and the need to provide the original ref. with the duplicate, but I've not come across the x ! yyy bit in Help. Does that apply to a flat file import?

And if not, does that mean that a flat file import limits you to one duplicate?

[Jan]

I would recommend using the format above, which is hierarchical, I used a similar flat file format but found that it made Actinic crash. I tested the format above and it worked well.

Regards,

[john harding]

So even though I'm basically attempting a flat import I use the x ! yyy and x can go higher than 1... Have I got that right?

[Duncan Rounding]

Duplicate naming is the same regardless of the type of import method.

I would also agree with Jan that hierarchical imports are better though.

[john harding]

I can see that you can do a lot more with hierarchical import than flat, but I don't want to bite off more than I can chew. I have a relatively simple catalogue structure - no components, choices, dilemmas ... and my current need is to get online fairly quickly a large chunk of catalogue that is currently just a dumb Pdf.

Also, I've never yet used databases, and this is not a good time to be taking on a new learning task.

So, granted that hierarchical import would be the ideal, is there anything I'm likely to seriously regret by going ahead with taking the spreadsheet approach at this point?