Just type in your category codes, one code per line, ending the last line with a hard carriage return.
ProductBuilder™ - Online Help
Let's face it, entering
products in your Merchant store can become quite a drag if you're going to do
it
through the Admin interface. Anyone with many products to enter into his/her
store will resort to importing
the products data using a flatfile and the Import Products From Flat File
facility that comes with Miva Merchant.
But, creating the flat
file to import is a whole other story. You can create it with a text editor
like Notepad, or you
can use a spreadsheet program like Excel that doesn't do the greatest job of
creating a well formatted flatfile.
ProductBuilder™ is
a 32bit Windows application that makes managing your products easy, efficient
and simple.
In a few easy steps, you can populate your Merchant store with products and
easily make changes to your products
without the frustration of using the Admin interface. Please read through this
whole document before using the
software, so that you have a good understanding of how it works and anything
you should look out for.
Installing the Software
ProductBuilder™ comes
with 4 files: ProductBuilder.exe, LOCPRODS.DBF, LOCPRODS.DBT and Categories.txt..
Place all four files together in a folder and run the exe from that folder.
Before You Start
The first thing you should
do is define the Category Codes you are using in your store. This is done by
editing
the Categories.txt file, using Notepad. ProductBuilder™ uses this
file to build the dropdown selections in the
Category Code field. You can add new categories to Categories.txt at any time,
but you'll need to run the
program again for these categories to showup in the dropdown field.
Just type in your category
codes, one code per line, ending the last line with a hard carriage return.
The Process
Run ProductBuilder™
locally on your Windows 95/98/NT/2K computer and enter all your product information
into its builtin database. TIP: You can place HTML code
in your product's description. Keep it readable by
using hard carriage returns. These will be stripped out when the import file
is created.
One click of the Export menu and in seconds your flatfile is created, perfectly formatted for importing into your store.
If you wish to view the prodexport.dat file, just click on Files,
View Export File. This will automatically open Notepad with
the dat file loaded. Now you're looking at a perfectly formatted import file,
because it uses the | (pipe character) as its
delimiter, avoiding any problems that can arise when using tabs or commas as
a delimiter.
Now, this is something you wouldn't want to have to do
by hand! ProductBuilder™ can save you alot of grief.
You are ready
now to go and import the data into your store.
Importing the Data
Open the Admin interface
in your store, then under your store's Utilities, click on the
Import Products From Flat File
utility.
Click on the Upload File
button next to the Data File field and browse to the local directory where you've
installed ProductBuilder™. Here you'll find the flat file that it produced,
named: prodexport.dat. Check the
Overwrite checkbox and then click the Upload button. The flat file will be uploaded
to your server and the
pop-up window will disappear. Select Other for the Delimiter and replace the
comma in that field with the
| (pipe character). Then click the Next button.
About Existing Products Selections:
If you are importing products into an empty store, leave this setting at the
default "Keep Existing Products"
as there will be no existing products to be concerned about. Otherwise, you
should designate how possible
duplications are handled.
Keep Existing Products
- Select this option to import products that are not already in your store,
and leave
the existing products as they are.
Update Existing Products - Use this form to select the specific fields
you wish to update. Select "Skip" for
those fields you do not want updated. Only the information in the selected fields
that is different from the
existing file will be changed. Everything else will be left as is. NOTE:
You MUST always select the Product
Code first as this is the field that Merchant will use to search for and identify
each record to update.
Replace Existing Products - This will replace existing product records
with the new data imported for all
products that have matching product codes. Any null, or empty fields in the
new product data imported will
overwrite existing fields with a blank. This option will not "update"
specific fields. The entire record will be
replaced.
Caution!
Do NOT use this option if attribute information has been added to the products
in Merchant. Attribute
information will be erased. Use the Update Existing Products option instead.
NOTE:
if you're going to assign your products to different Categories,
you should make sure the Categories
already exist in your store.
Need a quick way to get product attributes into your store? See our AttributeBuilder program.
Click the Import button,
and your products are all updated. It's that simple!
Getting Your Existing Products
into the Program
ProductBuilder™ offers a way to populate a new store with products and
assign those products to
categories within your store. So what about someone who already has a store
with many products in it? Of
course you wouldn't want to have to re-type all that information in again! ProductBuilder™
has a handy
utility that will allow you to get your existing products into its local database.
Using FTP, find your Products.dbf and Products.dbt files in your
Miva data directory under your 00000001/
directory (actual number may vary) and download those 2 files into the directory
that you've installed
ProductBuilder™. Click on Utilities, then Build Local
Database from Store Database. In seconds, all your
existing products will be entered into ProductBuilder's local database. There's
only one little gotcha with this,
and that is that the Products.dbf doesn't store the Category that a product
is assigned to. So you'll need to
go through each product in ProductBuilder™
and select the Category you want the product assigned to, from
the dropdown selection box of your category listing.
About The Utilities Menu
There are a number of utilities to help you manage your local database here's
an explanation of what they
do:
Pack Local Database - Whenever you delete a product record, the record
is not physically removed from
the database, but rather, it is marked as deleted. Having deleted records in
the database does not affect
what goes into the flat file it creates. Deleted records are simply skipped.
But, if you wish to reduce the
size of the local database, you can run the pack routine which will physically
remove the records from
the database.
Zap Local Database - In dBASE parlance, to "zap" a database
is to remove all records within the database
and that is exactly what will happen. If you work with a number of stores, you
might want to Zap the
local database, bring in the store's database to get those products into the
program to work with this
new collection of data.
Dealing With Timeout Issues
If you have a large number of products to import into your store, and your store
is sharing resourves with other
stores on your server, you might be confronted with timeout errors when trying
to import a large flat file. You
can always ask your IHP to set the timeout limits higher, but your host may
not want to do that.
To get around timeouts when importing large files, you can break the file into
smaller pieces and import each
in turn, until you have all your products imported into your store. ProductBuilder™
has already done the
major work, that of creating a correctly formatted flat file. When you click
on Files, View Export File, the program
calls up Notepad with your export file loaded. You can open another copy of
Notepad and just copy and paste
junks of your export file into new dat files and save them to disk. As an example,
you could create prodexport1.dat,
prodexport2.dat, etc. Then
go through the process of importing them into your store, one at a time. You'll
have to experiment to see just how large a flat file can be imported within
the timeout settings of Miva Merchant.
NOTE: make sure the last line of any export file you create ends with
a carriage return/line feed, ie. click
the Enter key with the cursor at the end of the last line. Make sure you don't
have any blank lines below
the last line, or you'll have empty records imported.
TIP: If you have a store now with so many products in it that you cannot
export the data because of timeouts,
then ProductBuilder™ can help you deal with getting that data out, because
it will build a local database
of all your products directly from your Products.dbf, and avoid timeout issues
all together that would arise in
this situation if you had to export your products to a flat file.