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22 hours ago, Paul C said:

OK so in a fresh install of the development branch (9.1.0) from git I created a very simple category import file with the following contents (Note that category id = 2 is "Home" and category id = 1 is "Root" so both are there by default and omitted):

Category ID;Active (0/1);Name *;Parent category;Root category (0/1);Description
3;1;Women;2;0;Clothing for women
4;1;Men;2;0;Clothing for men
5;1;Shoes;3;0;Shoes for women
6;1;Shoes;4;0;Shoes for men

I imported it successfully and have the two top-level categories "Women" and "Men" each with a subcategory of "Shoes". There is the issue however that both the "Shoes" subcategories have their link_rewrite field in the database set to "shoes".

I then tried again (selected options to "Delete all categories before import" and "Force all ID numbers") with the following import file:

Category ID;Active (0/1);Name *;Parent category;Root category (0/1);Description;Rewritten URL
3;1;Women;2;0;Clothing for women;women
4;1;Men;2;0;Clothing for men;men
5;1;Shoes;3;0;Shoes for women;shoes-women
6;1;Shoes;4;0;Shoes for men;shoes-men

This seems to work for me and all of the categories were individually accessible.
  

Thanks, I have just tested on 9.0.0 and 8.2.1 also and it works, kind of! So the banner at the top of category import page is slightly misleading!

You can use parent ID (certainly as CSV, I haven't properly tested XLS yet), BUT, the categories need to be in place first.

In my case, I imported EVERYTHING to the home category with their FIXED ID's, then re-ran the import with the correct PARENT ID. I had to do this as our categories aren't sequential, so after deleting everything, it threw an error - the parent ID must exist before it can be a parent (which makes sense).

ie. we may have

ID, Name, Parent ID

10, Shoes, 100

100, Men, 2

So I ran:

10, Shoes, 2

100, Men, 2

Then re-ran the first file. This seemed to work fine. So I am not sure why PS says it's not supported, although I guess it isn't supported in a single pass fashion unless there are no categories that have a Parent ID higher than it's own ID.

Thanks for this! Much appreciated.

NOTE I have only tested with a CSV, not Excel yet, but the last time I used Excel with IDs, it saw them as strings and made a load of categories with numbers as their NAME.