Presta 1.7 - categories & sub- import by IDs error from xls

[Mircea EE]

Hi guys, I'm a new Presta user and moving from a customized solution. 

Here's an issue I can't solve and that's giving me lots of headache and lost time.

By importing a full list of items from the same producer, all goes well, but not the import of the categories and subcategories by IDs from the xls file.

The import procedure says we should choose a Default category, which i did, and Associated cat, as many as we need, as long as we separated them by "," - which I did. 

Now, the import works, but presta doesn't associate the id's in the xls with the ones in admin, but creates them as new ones. 

Here's an example: 

ID's in Admin: 65 (football) Default category, 255 (football shorts), 289 (running shorts) 320 (fitness shorts) etc Associated Categories => the associated categ column in xls is 255,289,320

=> after the import for a product allocated to that Default and Assoc Cat, the product is not to find in these categories, instead presta generated a new category 6525528932 or 255289320

My guess is that it's from the formatting of the cells in xls, but I ve tried em all and ran out of options. 

A little help is highly appreciated.

Thanks.

Edited March 22, 2020 by Mircea EE (see edit history)

[przemke]

Hi there,

Presta 1.7.6.4. I just stumbled upon probably the same problem. I import products from CSV. So here's no cell formatting. So far there is only one category associated to a product. When I put the category ID instead of a name - for example 1001, the imported product lands in a newly created 1001 category instead of the previously imported subcategory with an "1001" ID.

It should work like that (importing by category ID), doesn't it ? How else presta should know which subcategory the product belongs if there are many of the same name? They have to be same name for instance "mens" and "womens" for many main categories

Edited March 23, 2020 by przemke (see edit history)

[Mircea EE]

Hi przemke, 

thanks for your reply. True, csv has no formatting, but I don't feel very confortable using it. I prefer xls. I guess that presta should have some solutions for this, as long as they have the module ready to use with xls. 

Yes, clearly we are talking about importing by category ID - this is actually the problem. 

When I put the category ID instead of a name - for example 1001, the imported product lands in a newly created 1001 category instead of the previously imported subcategory with an "1001" ID. => Yes, that's exactly the point. It creates new categories and subcat instead of allocating them to the ID's.

Thanks. 

[przemke]

Hi Mircea. I am also pretty new to this. I think I'll convert the files to xls eventually as the lack of formatting is timewasting. Just wanted to keep it simple for now as I knew CSV was the standard for years.

I think our problem here seems to be quite basic for Prestashop, and somebody should notice this soon ! (maybe it's a new bug).

[przemke]

I moved to *.ods  format now. It works fine so far (we are using Libreoffice so preferred tha native format).

Turned out importing by category ID on a sandbox-test version of our shop works OK ! So we don't know what the problem is here...

[Mircea EE]

Yes, looks basic to me, too and I don't understand the lack of reaction from Presta.

Thanks for the tip on the ods format. Will try it.

Cheers.

 

[przemke]

Quote

 

Looks like I found the solution for me! Suspecting some previous category/product remainings to be the cause, I installed "prestashop cleaner" (official) and cleaned everything to the ground. After fresh import of categories>brands>and then products, the products land in the proper categories (imported by ID).

Hope this cleaner module will not cause problems at the same time (as I read it happened for some people).

PS Do you also use "JX Megamenu" module ? After the clean up I realized this one takes data from categories so perhaps it had something to do with the problem - just guessing.

 

[przemke]

Was your issue resolved Mircea ?

Btw does anybody know if assigning multiple categories to one product during import should work ? For example I have "1001,1002" in the category field and the products gets assigned only to the first one