Category import not working?

Hi,
I have a working 4.3 site, and am upgrading to 4.6 now.
Instead of regular upgrade process I chose to do a clean install to get rid of some old crap.
Got an empty site now, and want to import products, categories, brands... not much else needed really.

I started with categories and it's just not working.
How is it possible that it can be a total mess with just some 15-20 categories? I did the excel export from 4.3 and imported it to 4.6. It should be a no brainer. But it doesn't work, many categories are skipped, I get errors and the structure is mess.
So, the structure in 4.6 category export is apparently completely different, so I did en export from 4.6 just to get excel template, filled everything manually, even deleted all descriptions (the table is below), but it still fails.

It doesn't work at all, several categories are missing, children from them are moved to other parents etc.

How can something as simple as this:


get converted to this after import??


I've created many import routines in other systems before, and it never required a diploma in nuclear physics really.
Is it completely impossible to do a simple export/import working in nopCommerce?

Just for the fun of it, I've tested brand/manufacturer export/import. That went even better, import resulted in success according to import function, never mind the 8 of them being dropped...
This is 4.3:


and this is the successful import in 4.6:


Am I just being stupid here, or what is the problem?

Things like this make people running to other systems in panic... And don't even start me on not being able to export/import orders in nop.

Too bad I have several good customers running nop.

Anyone?

Category Import normally works fine
Do you have Id's in the first column in the Execl file - if so remove them
If you have categories with parents you may need to import the categories without parents first
Then export all categories and add the new categories and set the ParentCategoryId as required
You can export a standard Category file from the demo to check you have the correct format
See https://admin-demo.nopcommerce.com/Admin/Category/List

Regards importing Orders I have a Plugin that will import orders
See https://www.selectsystems.com.au/import-export-manager

Hi, Damir. I am very sorry that you are facing such a problem. Import/Export in nopCommerce was not designed to migrate from version to version. Therefore, files made in an earlier version (as well as vice versa) cannot be used as they are in a later version. If you absolutely want to transfer your data in this way, then you'd better use an empty XML file from version 4.60 and adapt the data from 4.30 to it. But I think that it will be easier to take your database from 4.30, upgrade it to 4.60, which has become much easier compared to previous releases and further as you wish: export data or simply remove everything unnecessary from the new database.

Sergei-k wrote:

Yeah, I gave up after a while. I took 4.3 and upgraded. Now I have to fight all the Nop_Templates plugin that get senile in the process and forget (delete) all the settings. It's ok for my site, but one of my customers has thousands of rows in those tables, and all of that will probably need to be redone manually.
Nop-Templates people won't answer support issues anymore, so we are forced to do it the hard way.

That was the reason we wanted to see it we can do the clean installation and just start from scratch. It's much easier than going in to all the plugins and redo the settings.
Thanks for the answer anyway.

I guess people wanting to move to nopCommerce from other systems will have similar problems with their imports, and will give up before they even try it. It's a shame really, flexible imports are important to any ecommerce system.

Yidna wrote:

It's too much of a hack solution to even bother with it. I've upgraded the 4.3 database now.
Thanks anyway.

About your order import plugin, it can be interesting, as one of my customer will upgrade from 4.0 to 4.6 soon, and we have to test everything on staging server first, so some orders will inevitably be missing from new installation.
I suppose we can use your plugin just to import those missing orders when we launch 4.6 site?

Hi Damir,

Please check my reply to your problem with the upgrade.

@Sergei

Since it is a very common issue that customer don't properly upgrade to new versions of nopCommerce and especially they don't use the original plugins.json files and eventually install the plugins again over a database where the plugins were previously installed.
So I was thinking that it will be quite useful for troubleshooting to write in the activity log when a plugin is Updated and write from which version it was updated (same as you already have Install a new plugin). As we don't have access to the plugins.json file to see which plugins should be updated from the administration, we can use this information in the activity log to know if the plugin was updated or not in the current database.

Thank you,
Boyko

Hi Boyko,

Thanks for the suggestion, I think it's a good idea, I created a ticket and we will consider this possibility

Yidna wrote:

Hi Yidna,

This worked for me. But if I have multiple sub category names i.e. "Others" under the parent category I am unable to import more than one of those "others" together while importing child categories. Any idea of how I can do it?

Sergei-k wrote:

Hi Sergie,

I am trying to import a category list that has something like, "Others" sub category under multiple parent categories. I could create it on the application.

But when I export categories, delete all existing categories I am unable to get those multiple "others" child categories.

How can I work a bulk import/export in such cases?

ckvigneshccts wrote:
What version of nopCommerce ?

When you export the categories each of the "Others" categories should have a unique Id in the ParentCategoryId column

Then when you import the "Others" categories the should then associate with each of the existing categories with a CategoryId equal to the ParentCategoryId in the import file