I have noticed that the affiliatewindow feeds can be a bit hit and miss, some examples UK Domains and hosting has 19 entries yet when I check it on my website it has 2. I have also noticed that some feeds dont display properly on the first registration page.
Also noticed that some of them attempt an import but just come up modified, there is no product quantity displayed but when you check the merchants listing it appears again with reduced amount of listings.
Has anyone else had this with affiliatewindow feeds, I am wondering whether there are invalid characters in some of the feeds.
I have had a look and the feeds appear OK. I tried playing about with chmoding the folder and re-uploading the file and when I reimported I have got the full 19 products. The file was the same size on my PC and on my server so I have no idea what is going on.
Still seem to be getting partial imports, example is 24-7 electrical with 4001 products. First try gave me 2123 and second has given me 1790. I still suspect either a timeout or an issue with the feeds, the files certainly appear OK as I am only using csv format at the moment.
This is an example listing
36536.20060404164020.csv
Register
Filters
Extras
Import
2006-04-04 11:41:20
The imported and quantity columns are empty.
The Feed Register problem appears to be down to the feed contents there is a small square after every entry in the masterCategory field, I think this either represents a TAB or a CR, cant remember which but this is causing the problems.
Hi,
I just tried 24-7 Electrical (XML and CSV); and out of 4001 reported products, 3827 are imported.
I think you are correct in that you are having a timeout issue. For large feeds, it isn't really practical to use the "Import" link on the admin page as many hosts limit the execution time of a PHP script to 30 seconds, and this may not be long enough to complete the import.
The visible result of a timeout problem is nothing being displayed in the imported and quantity columns (as you describe); and variable number of results shown in a product serch for that merchant.
Please see the following threads for discussion of the timeout issue and various solutions:
http://www.pricetapestry.com/node/17
http://www.pricetapestry.com/node/109
With regards to registration of the Affiliate Window text feeds; can you confirm that when you click "Register", the format string is autodetected as "csv|44|1|34"...
Cheers,
David.
Reply from my host. Maximum upload time is 30 seconds and max file size is 2mB. Damn and blast.
Whow that's restrictive. I'll start a thread to see what hosts other people are with. I'll also put together some notes regarding what might be required "over and above" the most basic of hosting accounts in order to work with large datafeeds.
For those that may have been following this I setup a cron job on my host on the import.php script and I am now seeing 7000+ on a couple of feeds which is close to what they are supposed to be, this may be a workaround for this issue.
Hi,
Normally, this happens because the required fields (Product Name, Price and Buy URL) are missing. It is not uncommon for some feeds to have the majority of records rejected by the import process.
The situation where no products are listed; first confirm by viewing the file manually that it actually has product records visible. Some feed generation scripts (including Affiliate Window's) generate empty files or empty XML if the generation script did not run for some reason, such as if the URL was wrong. Common reasons for a failed download from Affiliate Window are an invalid password, invalid merchant ID or a merchant ID for a programme that you have not joined. Having said that, I just fetched UK Domains feed, and was able to register all 19 products using both Affiliate Window's XML and CSV format.
The first thing I would do is have a look at the file on your server and check that everything looks ok. If not, let me know and i'll have a think what else may be restricting the number of records.
One test you might want to do is upload the actual file that you downloaded from Affilaite Window into the Magic Parser test script. The 2 files I just downloaded can be viewed as follows:
UK Domains (XML)
UK Domains (CSV)
One final point with Affiliate Window feeds - make sure that you select "PRODUCTNAME" and not "PRODUCT" as the Product Name field during registration otherwise it will import with zero records...!
Hope this helps...