Automatic import
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I’ve miss-read your description, in that I was expecting that I was going to be able to automatically import current stock levels, however I’m actually able to automatically export stock levels and other info. I think that being able to update stock levels from an external system would be a really good feature to have. We get people phoning up to find out if we have something in stock and if the website was up to date then they would know without the hassle of the phone call. However we don’t want to have to do this manually.
Would it be possible for your module to check a location on the website for a file and then automatically do the update without any human involvement? I’d certainly pay a bit more for that feature and I’m sure other people would.
Geoff
Would it be possible for your module to check a location on the website for a file and then automatically do the update without any human involvement? I’d certainly pay a bit more for that feature and I’m sure other people would.
Geoff
| Type: | Discussion |
|---|---|
| Status: | New |
Thanks for raising the issue. It would be reasonably easy to add a job which would look for files/incoming/stock.csv and if present import it. I will certainly add that to the road map.
Thanks for the prompt response. We were early adopters of the eCommerce module and as a result all our tier pricing was done as a special feature. We are now switching to the latest version and your mass CSV update module has already done a great job of getting all the prices in without the pain of manually going through each product and entering them by hand. Going forward we will be using it to update stock levels. It's good to hear that it's fairly straight forward to add as a feature and I'll look forward to it being added in a future release.
Having said it's fairly straight forward, and having got halfway through doing this, I'd like your views on how I should determine which fields are to be updated.
In the dashboard, you have to use checkboxes to indicate which fields you wish to update. This is so you do not have to remove too many fields from the data in order to update a single field. With an automated upload, this won't be possible.
I would guess that the thing to do would be to only update columns that are present in the file. My thinking here is that the data file will most probably be automatically generated by a foreign system, which hopefully can be tuned to output only the fields that are required, e.g. ID, qty and price. You most probably would not want to update pricing tiers every day.
In the dashboard, you have to use checkboxes to indicate which fields you wish to update. This is so you do not have to remove too many fields from the data in order to update a single field. With an automated upload, this won't be possible.
I would guess that the thing to do would be to only update columns that are present in the file. My thinking here is that the data file will most probably be automatically generated by a foreign system, which hopefully can be tuned to output only the fields that are required, e.g. ID, qty and price. You most probably would not want to update pricing tiers every day.
Processing all the column headings that the software
recognises has to give users the most flexibility. I suspect that most
people will only want to update stock on a daily basis. That said a little
while back the people we bought solder from gave us the price for that day
because the market was so volatile so there may be people that want to
automate a price import. If the CSV has to only contain column headings
that can be imported I can't see that being an issue, I've got our
database to output the CSV file and can easily choose what is in it. The
same has to be true of anyone else that is going to be able to automate
generating a CSV file and get it FTP'd on to a website.
I have just uploaded version 1.1 which adds a dashboard job. Upload your file into files/incoming/stock.csv and then run the job, either through the dashboard or from the URL.
Note that the file is not removed after processing, so your FTP/batch files will need to handle that.
Note that the file is not removed after processing, so your FTP/batch files will need to handle that.
Jero,
Your import feature has been working great for the last month or two, however we've just changed the way we are using our website. Now most products are on limited stock, but negative quantities are allowed, however some stuff it is set to not allow negative quantities. Previously all products were set to use system defaults, now some don't and are forced to not allow negative numbers. The problem I have is that when it does an automatic update of stock levels for some reason all the products revert to using system defaults and there's no reason why the update should change this. But this then means that people can order items we don't have. The same thing happens if the update is done manually. I don't think it should be changing the "allow negative quantity" field, any ideas?
Your import feature has been working great for the last month or two, however we've just changed the way we are using our website. Now most products are on limited stock, but negative quantities are allowed, however some stuff it is set to not allow negative quantities. Previously all products were set to use system defaults, now some don't and are forced to not allow negative numbers. The problem I have is that when it does an automatic update of stock levels for some reason all the products revert to using system defaults and there's no reason why the update should change this. But this then means that people can order items we don't have. The same thing happens if the update is done manually. I don't think it should be changing the "allow negative quantity" field, any ideas?
It's a bug. Please update ASAP.