Stock & Price Feeds

[jxm28788]

I thought I read here a long time back that someone was attempting to find a way to update stock levels and prices in actinic from a data feed, but I've been searching around and can't find any threads.

Has anyone here found a way to update their sites using a price/stock feed (in reality a .csv file)? or someone that could suggest how it could be done?

[Mike Hughes]

you can either 'import' the csv file or 'link' to it.

Importing has less of a performance impact as you do it as needed and Actinic then holds the data internally. You do need to remember to re-import when changes are made or Actinic won't know about them.

Linking can slow actinic down a bit as it uses the csv file as the source of the data itself, rather than anything in the database. Any changes made to the csv file are automatically reflected in Actinic but you can get sharing problems if you're working on the csv when Actinic is started which can cause Actinic to drop the link.

Mike

[jxm28788]

you can either 'import' the csv file or 'link' to it.

So just the standard import? with the update option? what happens if you change something in actinic, wouldn't the product get overwritten? Or would you do a full import to populate the catalog, then strip the import file down to just the p/n, stock and price...?

[Duncan Rounding]

You only need to link to or import the fields you require to change.

[jxm28788]

I could write a perl script to take the suppliers price/stock feed and convert it to an import file, but is there anyway to automate imports?

It would be impractical to have to manually open actinic several times a day (or even once a day) and then manually to an import.

Also, does 'linking' work with v7 or is that some new thing?

[Mike Hughes]

Linking isn't that new. I use it on V6 to keep track of stock from an external spreadsheet.

All I link in is the ProductID, StockControl, and StockinHand data.

Mike