Hi,


I think you need more knowledge on how ECommerce works within Joomla.
OK here goes,
Firstly you need Categories and if necessary Sub-Categories then within these Categories you place the individual Products.
e.g.

Category = Shoes
sub Category = Mens Shoes
2nd sub category = Mens Sports Shoes.
After categories are created, you then add the individual Products.

I think the above example is easier to follow than the Polycom Price list.

In order to export these results to the E-commerce Joomla plugin called HikaShop, you finally need to take the very simple step of converting the resultant spreadsheet to a .csv format.

However, if you have no experience in creating E-commerce sites from external spreadsheets, I can understand your initial confusion.

My requirement is to create (VBScript or Macro?) that will automate the conversion to a column and row format as outlined by the HikaShop support team,


Best regards,

Tim

Hi,

I think in order to get the data so that it works with the system. You need to know what the end format of the Excel sheet should look like.
The example of the file you posted has rows of data.
How would one determine as you put it "Parent/Child" relation.
If we can understand the format then we may be able to create a code for it.

I'm thinking you only want data in 2 columns.
Column A has the "Parent category" and column B has the "Sub category".

Hi,
I take your point. I will send a manually altered page of the source spreadsheet to Support at Hikashop to ensure it will be in the correct final format.

Hi,

Thanks for the feed back. I thought this was a "Dead" issue.
If we can still help let us know.

This project is taking some time, BUT i now have more definitive info from support at HikaShop.

Here is their suggestions;

"I know you can't add the products one at a time. That's the goal of the import system to add a whole bunch of products together in one go. So it doesn't change what I said so far.

And you can't pre create the categories via the interface ? Will the categories change in the future ?
If yes, then I do understand that you want to have the CSV embed the hierarchy of the categories in it.
In that case, you can have empty lines at the begining of your CSV with just the categories hierarchy and then just mention the categories in the products."

Here is an example of the Categories and 2 level of sub-Categories using an easier to understand product example set;

"parent_category,categories,product_name
FOOTWEAR,FOOTWEAR_MENS,
FOOTWEAR,FOOTWEAR_WOMENS,
FOOTWEAR_MENS,FOOTWEAR_MENS_DRESS,
FOOTWEAR_MENS,FOOTWEAR_MENS_SPORTS,
,FOOTWEAR_MENS_DRESS,product 1 in the dress category
,FOOTWEAR_WOMENS,product 2 in the womens category"

In practice, the actual Categories have more obscure titles but follow the same concept of Master Category and up to two levels of sub-Category.

In the original Polycom Conference room Equipment Spreadsheet all/only the Categories are in column A and they can only (I think) be differentiated by the cell formatting thus;
Main Categories are all caps.
Child Categories have a leading cap followed by lower case, and have a shaded cell background and Grandchild categories have leading cap followed by lower case and no cell background.
I cannot see any other way to differentiate one category from another.

All together the original spreadsheet has several hundred+ categories and 2,000+ Products.

The original Excel sheet is updated every month, and therefore the updating of the .csv must occur automatically, and can be run through CRON to further automate the upload to HikaShop.

Hi,

When I look at the file you posted I think I can see what you are referring to.
Row 1 has the "Parent Cat", row 3 has what I think is the Sub Cat. but in rows
4 thru 7 has "Description" will that be part of the Cvs file?