4/26/2006
Special Imports and Exports For ZenCart
One of the major weaknesses of an open source package like ZenCart is the lack of support for third party applications. Sure you can insert products by hand and process orders, but what if you already have products in another form such a Point of Sale system or inventory management system? What about integrating the sales process into an existing accounting package like QuickBooks?
EZ Populate is a ZenCart contribution that can solve the product importation problem for some uses. I have used this module successfully with a few clients, but for the majority, it lacks support for much outside the basic realm of importing products in a specific CSV format.
What about converting from another application like osCommerce to ZenCart?
Sites like Froogle and Shop.com and most affiliate programs have specific formats they expect data to be submitted in.
What can be done in situations like these?
- Have a custom import or export script created by a professional developer
- Write your own
- Contract a database developer to run a one-off import or export
If you are skilled in PHP, rolling your own import/export shouldn’t be prohibitively complex.
To export products, first query the products and products description tables to get the base product record. Queries suitable for copy/pasting from the original ZenCart source for this use are readily available just check out the product detail view template. Once the product record is available, product options and attributes can be easily sub-queried using the products_id. Now that all of the product data is available, it should simply be a matter of printing out the data rows in the order and format expected by the import application and iterating over each product and product option row.
Exporting orders is a similar excercise in that the basic order information is queried, then the products, product options and any secondary order information (such as payment records and comments) are queried. Then the result sets are iterated over printing out the data in the required format.
One-offs are a viable option only if the data manipulation needs performed only once or rarely (such as year end reports) and the steps are difficult to automate accurately.
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