Exporting to excel customers and products

Hey there, I am having some issues with exporting and importing products and customers. I am upgrading a clients store that they have been using for awhile. I had to set the images folder onto my server so their wouldn't be a size limit. This is why I need to export and import the clients information. The current store is version 1.4 so when I export to excel the information and try to import it into the newly updated store there are errors How can I resolve this issue? I don't want to have to place everything in one by one.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Hi

To answer your question, there are A LOT of differences between version 1.4 and 1.8 including many new fields (guessing around 10) that are in the 1.8 import that were not part of 1.4.   Start by doing this....do an export out of 1.8, even using sample data, so you can see the column headers and names as well as the format of the fields ( ie true/false, numeric, etc).  Then do an export of your products out of 1.4.   Wipe out all the 1.8 sample data rows except maybe one or set the 'published' value to FALSE so they don't appear in your store.

You will need to copy and paste, column by column, your data from the 1.4 export to the 1.8 version.  make sure of a few things:
1.  make sure you copy and paste from the same column header (ie Name) to the other (Name) in 1.8
2.  Don't delete any columns in 1.8
3.  Don't change the names or casing  of any column headers in 1.8
4.  Keep the data consistent in 1.8, for example you'll be able to see what fields are boolean, numeric, etc.   Make sure you copy those values in the records from 1.4 that you copy and pasted, so your new 1.4 records have those values in them as well.  That should get you going

Hope this helps and good luck

Shawn
NopAdmin.com Team

Hey thanks for the reply, I did do that before but I just left the extra areas blank so I was getting areas. I filled in the blank fields to match the sample item I made as suggested by you. I than got this notice when I tried to upload the new excel file

"Object cannot be cast from DBNull to other types."

I am not sure where to go from here.

Any help would be appreciated

Hey there,

It sounds to me like you have a true/false value in a fields that expects a numeric value.   Do an extract of the sample data in 1.8 and compare that, field by field, in the spreadsheet you are trying to upload.

If you still can't find it you can PM me, I may be able to step/debug your file through the NopAdmin excel import routine and tell you which field or fields it is having problems with.

Hope this helps

Shawn
NopAdmin.com Team

Hey thanks for all of your help, I did everything you mentioned and checked it over but noticed that in ver 1.4 it shows the created on as month/day/year where as 1.8 has it in decimals I changed it all to the sample version and it worked!

I do have one more question for you, like I said the whole purpose of this was to change the image folder to my server so there is unlimited space for the images instead of what is given on the database. Would there be a quick solution to do this instead of having to place each image in manually from the old store to the new store? If you know a way id be forever thankful! More so then already lol

Thanks again, Mike

Hi Mike, glad to hear the suggestions worked for you!  Great job and perserverance!  If you are running your database on SQL 2008, there is a handy T-SQL function called FILESTREAM that will accomplish what you want in a stored procedure.  Google it - there are a lot of examples on how to extract a BLOB to the file system using FILESTREAM.   If you are not using 2008, then really the only thing you could do is to extract them programmatically using VB.NET or C#.    It would be a fairly simple program to write.   I've developed them (ie NopAdmin) to take images from the file system and store them as BLOBs - same concept but just in reverse.

Just some questions - how many images are we talking about, and what kind of space limitations are you encountering?  

Shawn
NopAdmin.com Team

for anyone else facing this issue :

I think the fastest way to do this is just run the database upgrade scripts over the database - even if you don't plan to use the database i.e. just want to export the data

if you do this (upgrade the database) then connect to the database with a new nop version eg 1.8  then you can export everything in the correct format ready for importing to a new 1.8 store

I did this with a 1.4 version store this week - it took 5 mins to get the product and customer data from the old store into a v1.8

FYI according to codeplex
Allow store owner to change 'Pictures are stored into database / file system' option in production environment (Global settings)

is implemented in a recent changeset

The Client has roughly 700 products, we have them all in their now and it wasn't that bad we just had to change the paths from the database to our images folder so their is no space issues anymore on the database.

I do have one more question though, is there a way to take all of the customer sales information so it is on the dashboard like it is on the old store? If so how do you do this?