need help in transfering a store

[robm]

:confused:
Hi everyone,

Thank you for all previous help. I have 2 miva malls. I need to transfer the catagories, products, attributes and inventory with their settings from one mall to the next. This is for a particular store in the mall (#2 store) from the first mall to the (#2 store) to the second mall. I'm not sure which files to transfer. Any ideas will be greatly appreciated. I'm using ver. 4.12.

Thanks again,

Rob

[ILoveHostasaurus]

Are both versions of Merchant the same? And are you running any third party modules in either store that deal with products, categories, attributes or inventory?

[robm]

Yes both versions are the same and no special modules. However, one store i s on oui and the other is not.

[ILoveHostasaurus]

The problem you're going to run into is that a lot of databases in merchant are related to each other and you can't replace some without encountering problems unless you are careful to update all the others. For example, there's a database called storekey which tracks the number of products, categories, orders, attributes, and a bunch of other things. This database will also have records relating to openui in it. So when you copy things, you have to update it with all the new record counts since you can't replace it due to the fact that it has other store-specific data that you don't want replaced and can't replace.

If you have any modules installed, any at all, that do anything related to the databases you are replacing you may have some issues there too since they'll often go by record id's rather than something like product code. Depending on the version of openui, it may store some of the data you want to copy in its own databases and that alone would prevent things from working as intended since both stores aren't using openui and the same version of openui.

I'd probably recommend using import/export modules for all the data rather than trying to copy it in since the stores have differences and that would be a lot easier than trying to edit all the appropriate databases.

[robm]

Thank you. Is there a way to import/export categories?

[ILoveHostasaurus]

Not in that version of Merchant but you can do it with Excel since categories are not anything special other than code/name. You'll want to download the cats.dbf file from your mivadata/Merchant2/00000001/ directory and open it with Excel as a dbase database, then just save our the CODE and NAME columns into a text file; you can import that into the other store.

Now don't take the above idea and think you can edit dbf files using Excel and put them back on the server, it's not safe to do so and it will break your store, but it is safe to use as a quick way to extract data from a dbf file. :)

[robm]

Thank you very much!!!!!!:D

Not in that version of Merchant but you can do it with Excel since categories are not anything special other than code/name. You'll want to download the cats.dbf file from your mivadata/Merchant2/00000001/ directory and open it with Excel as a dbase database, then just save our the CODE and NAME columns into a text file; you can import that into the other store.

Now don't take the above idea and think you can edit dbf files using Excel and put them back on the server, it's not safe to do so and it will break your store, but it is safe to use as a quick way to extract data from a dbf file. :)

[robm]

One more questions in regards to the categories.
Should I only save the CODE and NAME columns in a text delimited file? What about the parent categories. Also the 4.12 doesn't offer categories import without OUI.

Wouldn't it be eisier if I just ftp the cats.dbf from one store to the next.

Best,

Rob

[ILoveHostasaurus]

You can copy it but none of the product mappings will come with it unless you also copy catxprod and then if you copy both of those and the products db is not the same you'll end up with orphaned records. If you copy them you'll also need to update the storekey.dbf with the correct cat counts, etc. I'd just install openui so both stores are the same and then you can import.

Or alternatively, maybe Storeman Pro from http://www.phosphormedia.com would work, you could publish the same product and category data to both stores easily any time you want.

[robm]

Gotcha, thanks