Easy Populate Advanced

Understanding Easy Populate Advanced

Easy Populate Advanced is a product content management system for adding, editing, and deleting existing products. It is a robust php script capable of handling many modifications to suit any oscommerce based shopping cart needs. It can be set-up to run as cron/schedule job, modified to take input from database instead of a text file, it can be modified to include product extra fields from the product table or from another tables; the list goes on and on. In fact it is the specific needs of an e-commerce site and capability shop owner/programmer that determines or limit what Easy Populate script can do.

* Easy Populate Advanced file name must have EPA prefix. Examples of proper file names are EPAxyz.txt, EPAXYY.txt and EPA_xyz.txt.

* Every row must end with EOROER and there must not be any other text or character after EOREOR column on each row.

* Product model (v_products_model) string length/number of characters must be less than or equal to 25. This is the predefine value in epconfigure.php ($modelsize = 25). If you need to have more than 25 characters change this value to say 50 ($modelsize = 50). Then you can either access you database directly and run ALTER TABLE `products` CHANGE `products_model` `products_model` VARCHAR( 50 ) or add this line to your easypopulate_import.php below include statements at the top; tep_db_query(“ALTER TABLE `products` CHANGE `products_model` `products_model` VARCHAR( 60 )”).

* The default file delimiter is tab.

* Header fields with the name of each column your want to import must be the first row that is v_products_id, v_products_model, …, v_status, v_action, EOREOR

* Unwanted columns can be deleted. For example v_products_image_sm_1, v_products_image_xl_1, v_products_url_1, v_date_avail, v_date_added can be deleted if they are not needed.

* v_status field for setting active and inactive products

* File split

* The default no of categories is 4 (v_categories_name_1, … ,v_categories_name_4), to have more categories, increase $max_categories from 4 to say 7 in epconfigure.php. Then add more columns to your EPA file to reflect the change. In case the $max_categories is now 7 then the EPA files should have (v_categories_name_1, v_categories_name_2, … ,v_categories_name_6, v_categories_name_7).

* The temp folder within the main install must be writteble. You can use a folder other than the temp folder ut your have to specifiy the name of your new folder in the configuration file.

* Multi language support.

Using Easy Populate Advanced to add product

To add new product value of the v_products_id must be 0; this is a required field, do not leave it blank or empty. In case you are sure you have unique product id, you can use your predefined product id.

Using Easy Populate Advanced to delete product

Use v_action column to delete products. Each row must have delete (all lower case)

Using Easy Populate Advanced to edit product

Using Easy Populate Advanced to manage product attributtes

Using Easy Populate Advanced with extra fields in product table

Using Easy Populate Advanced with extra fields in another table

Easy Populate Basic

Understanding Easy Populate Basic

Using Easy Populate Basic to add product

To add new product value of the v_products_model must be supplied and it must be unique; this is a required field, do not leave it blank or empty.

Using Easy Populate Basic to delete product

Using Easy Populate Basic to edit product

Using Easy Populate Basic to manage product attributtes

Using Easy Populate Basic with extra fields in product table

Using Easy Populate Basic with extra fields in another table