Importing a database of products from a CSV file

Hi fsardoni,

The CSV Export plugin wasn't really designed to be used this way. The plugin adds extra psuedo-fields for readability (e.g. ":label" for list fields). By default, CSV Export also removes the "dragsortorder" field from its output which isn't very human-readable.

It is possible to manually massage a CSV file into the format that phpmyadmin expects, but this can be very tricky.

Firstly, you can disable the skipping of fields by changing this line in the csvExport.php file:

$GLOBALS['CSVEXPORT_SKIP_FIELDS'] = array('dragSortOrder','createdBy._link','_filename','_link'); // These fields won't be exported from any table. Example: ('_filename','_link','lastUpdated','etc')

...to this:

$GLOBALS['CSVEXPORT_SKIP_FIELDS'] = array('createdBy._link','_filename','_link'); // These fields won't be exported from any table. Example: ('_filename','_link','lastUpdated','etc')

Next, you can manually strip out the extra fields that phpmyadmin isn't expecting. To see which fields it's expecting, do a CSV export from phpmyadmin.

Finally, when uploading your CSV file to phpmyadmin, you'll need to tell it to use commas (,) instead of semi-colons (;) for "Fields terminated by". You'd think that commas would be the default for CSV files. Go figure.

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Alternately, CMS Builder also has a backup feature available under Admin > General Settings > Database Settings; however, it backs up and restores all the tables in its database. What exactly is your workflow here? I might be able to suggest an alternate approach that could be simpler for you if I knew what it was that you were trying to accomplish.

I hope this helps! Please let me know if you have any questions.