ImportCSV Documentation

Globalissa.com

This page contains information about the ImportCSV tool.

Purpose

Visitors to your phpYellow site may add their listing online using the register page. Webmasters logged into the backend may add customer listings using the Quick Submit tool. If you wish to add bulk data automatically, then you may use the ImportCSV tool.

The purpose of the ImportCSV tool is to import csv data into a phpYellow directory. The tool automatically populates required database tables. ImportCSV takes the csv source file and loads it into your phpYellow directory. Many listings may be imported. The ImportCSV tool (with a yellow page crawler or csv file) gives you the capability to populate your unique directory with enough data to be a credible and competitive website in your niche market.

Creating a .csv source file

The phpYellow ImportCSV tool works with any properly formatted .csv file.


// example file format:
// name,address,city,state,zipcode,country,phone,fax,email,url


For example phpYellow ImportCSV tool works with YellowPageCrawler 3rd party software made by XShan at http://www.xshan.com

The specific product page is: http://www.xshan.com/Product/YPG.aspx Xshan also offers crawlers for your favorite site.

How to use YellowPageCrawler

Using the YellowPageCrawler is easy:

Browse to xshan homepage for more information about their product.

Using phpYellow ImportCSV

How to use

Rollback

This software has a rollback feature. After importing browse to your recent page recent.php. Examine the records. Are all the data fields correctly filled? If some data is wrong, for example there is a url where the email should be, then abort the import. The import may be aborted by clicking the 'Rollback' button. When clicked your database will revert to the state it was in prior to the most recent import.

Optional - Preparing data

If needed you may import a .csv file into Excel or equivalent application (see http://www.openoffice.org/). The important thing is to match the data fields into this order:

// example file format:
// name,address,city,state,zipcode,country,phone,fax,email,url

Categories - optional

A category data field may be added to the .csv file. If present in the .csv file the importer will use the .csv category. If there is no category data field present in the .csv file then the default posted category is used.

// _csv_cols in /importcsv/manage_import_handler.php needs to include a list of columns in the order they appear in the CSV file. Names must not change but they can be re-ordered. You will need to add category to _csv_cols if a category column exists in your source file.

Configuration defaults

listing.rank aka listing type

The importer uses the database default for the listing type. In a default installation this listing type is Bronze. If you want to globally set the beginning level of a new listing to some other listing type, either for all new listings, or just for imports, that is easily possible. This adjustment can be made at install time. The database change is an alter table statement and for importer specific it is a file edit.

listing.status

Records imported by the webmaster using the ImportCSV tool have their status set to 'approved' because the submission is made by the webmaster who in all likelihood must have some good reason for adding them ... whereas listings submitted by the online user are suspect and so their listing.status is flagged as 'pending'.

Known issues

Filesize:
There is no limit on filesize uploaded by ImportCSV, however your web server DOES have a limit on the size of file permitted for upload. This may be identified with admin > phpinfo(), or by looking in php.ini. The parameter is called upload_max_filesize and a typical value is 2 megabytes. Two megs is not sufficient for larger csv data files. If you find ImportCSV is not loading your csv file then check your upload_max_filesize. If upload_max_filesize is a small number, then ask your domain host isp to increase the permitted upload file size.

Buy


We also offer a hands off data import service where we do all the work for you. To inquire for details send one sample record containing all your data fields, along with a count of total records to import.