RobOrr

Start by looking through the DataFlow forum:

http://www.magentocommerce.com/boards/viewforum/85/

A good thread is:

http://www.magentocommerce.com/boards/viewthread/1840/

What vendors are we talking about? Do you have links?

I’ll take a peek and see if I can help.

https://shop.cwrelectronics.com/feeds/productdownload.php - this is the one that I’m mainly concerned with right now - for CWRelectronics.com.

I’ve looked at your thread there too, on getting the data flow set up, but that was one of them that I didn’t understand what was going on. I’m really just looking for a set of steps needed to get it set up - I know that I’ve got to talk also with the IT guy at my vendor to make sure I’ve got their end set up, but before I do that, I want to make sure that I’m ready to go on this end when I talk to him again. Basically he told me that I needed to have my cart set up to go pull the data from their server.  However, I have no idea on how to do that. I understand in theory how this should happen but specifically how to do it is the hard part.

any luck/help/thoughts?

Link doesn’t work Rob and I don’t have an account with them.

If you want to send me an email with the feed attached I’ll take a peek at it and see if I can get it to work.

ron(at)a1webshopping(dot)com

You’ve got mail

@RobOrr

Apparently you don’t. Tried to send you an email and got this in return.

-------------------------------------------
Delay reason: SMTP error from remote mail server after RCPT TO::
host mail.roborr.net [209.132.201.252]: 451 Greylisted, please try again in 300 seconds
-------------------------------------------

Ummmm...that doesn’t look good.

Anyways, what I was asking you to do was send me a copy of the actual data feed itself (not just the specs) and I’ll see what I can do with it.

I still haven’t been able to get back in touch with the vendor - I am going to call again today.  I need to get this up and running.  Sorry about hte email address - I don’t know why that didn’t work as I use it daily.  Try orracleFSU at gmail dot com.

I’ve got an appointment tomorrow with my vendor and will hopefully be able to get my data feed set.  I’ll keep you posted.

Okay - I’ve figured out that I have a string that will allow me to pull data from my vendor and it is provided in either xml format, or csv.  For now, unless I need to do it otherwise, I will just leave it in xml.  So I get this url string within which I can adjust variables to get the info that I want.  You can even use a browser to get this info and it displays the xml file. 

Now I have gone in to the admin section and have edited the “import all products” profile to map to some of the fields that my vendor is offering.  Question is, how do I set it up in Magento to utilize this string to pull the data?  I’ve not seen a field where it would be appropriate (so far as I can tell) to put this string and I’m not even sure I’ve got the import profile set up correctly. It looks like it would be looking for a local file on the server with one setting - it doesn’t appear to me to be an FTP transfer so I’ve not set that up, and I don’t even know what “interactive” is supposed to represent. The string is listed above (in part).  Any ideas on how best to do this?  And it looks like with this vendor, that I will have to modify the string to perform different actions, so maybe I’ll need to set up a couple different actions because i’d like to update daily and remove/change status on items out of stock or discontinued. I’ve got a rough idea of what needs to happen here, but not sure how to go about making magento do it.

any ideas?

anyone?

guess not....

Hi RobOrr,

I’m following along behind you by a couple months.  I use CWR as well and have no idea what to do with the data string they provide.

Any luck?

Ok, so dealing with the CWR feed is a huge pain. They’ve almost 15,000 products, and almost 10,000 activate at any given time.

Basically, what I did was setup a server locally that pulls down the cwr feed, processes it, and then sync to magneto using magento’s web service api. Let me tell you now, this is not for the feint of heart. And, it is slow as hell. So, my best record is 48 hours to do a full population from the datafeed.

I am still trying to figure out a way to speed things up, but nothing is looking very promising so long as I am using the magento web services api, it is just really slow.