Some products imported with CSV missing default name. price, reimporting doesn't help --multi-store
We have run into a very strange situation with product imports where certain products will be missing the default name and price after importing, even though those fields are present in the CSV.
Background on our setup:
Version 1.9.2.1 of Magento CE
Fresh install, NO extensions, NO themes
7 stores
158 products
When running Imports through the Magento backend or via a 3rd party service that uses an Extension but apparently accesses the basic Magento import functionality, we noticed that certain items would be missing the default Name and Price after import.
During the actual import process, there's nothing to indicate any kind of problem -- no errors, the files validate fine.
When we load the CSV we get: Checked rows: 1106, checked entities: 158, invalid rows: 0, total errors: 0
When we check the products afterwards, we find 6 products missing Name and Price for the default store -- those fields are filled out but GREYED OUT with the "Use Default" checkbox checked on all the other store entries -- and a further 3 products that are just missing default Price. with the same grey out/checkbox situation.
When we import a CSV of just those 9 problem products without changing ANYTHING ELSE (we just delete the other rows in the CSV), they import fine with no errors.
Reducing the number of rows in the CSV from 1106 to 471 (by removing rows for stores that otherwise had no data for that product) changes the number of products with the errors from 9 to 3 -- and here's the part that is killing our brain: BUT THEY ARE 3 DIFFERENT PRODUCTS and the previous 9 import WITHOUT ANY ERRORS. Importing just those 3 products in a separate CSV results in no errors, regardless of whether the products already exist and we're just updating them, or we delete all the products in the catalog and import them fresh.
We're using a text program to edit the CSV that is definitely saving the file in the proper UTF-8 format, and we created a dummy product inside Magento and exported the CSV to use as the template for our CSV.
Things we've tried:
1. Importing a CSV of just the problem items without any changes to fields or characters, etc. RESULT: all items import WITHOUT errors
2. Splitting up the whole CSV into multiple parts and importing them separately. RESULT: The problem items import WITH errors
3. Reducing the number of rows in the CSV. RESULT: DIFFERENT products display the errors, original problem items import WITHOUT errors.
4. Removing ALL multi-store lines and importing the whole CSV using only the default store data. RESULT: All items import WITHOUT errors. This leads us to believe that there is a problem with the import function and multi-store setups.
5. Removing ALL BUT ONE of the extra stores (so we have default store + 1 other store) and importing the whole CSV. RESULT: DIFFERENT products display the errors, original problem items import WITHOUT errors.
6. Importing the whole CSV once, verifying that errors display on the problem products, reimport the whole CSV again without deleting any products. RESULT: Errors persist on problem products
7. Same as #6 but only reimporting problem products. RESULT: Errors are gone
8. Generating a new CSV with slightly different data (different item quantities). RESULT: A similar number of problem items display errors, some overlapping with the previous ones, some new.
9. Increasing the amount of memory and processing time available to PHP. RESULT: No change in any situation listed above.
Unfortunately, we can't use a 3rd-party Product Importer extension to bypass the Magento import function, because we are getting the same issues with a 3rd-party connector that ties Magento to our accounting software. The connector generates a CSV file in Magento's required format and uses whatever native import functions are in Magento to do it's job.
If there is some soft limit on rows, we can possibly address that with the company that provides the connector, but there's no apparent rhyme or reason to the products that display problems or their relationship to the number of rows in the CSV, aside from fewer rows being more likely to import without errors. This test run of 158 products only represents about 10% of our actual catalog, but even that shouldn't be causing this sort of problem. We suspect some sort of bug related to our multi-store setup, but even reducing the CSV rows by eliminating all but the default store and one other, we still see these errors. There is nothing in the logs anywhere that we can find to tell us why these particular products are being imported incorrectly, and the fact that the problem products themselves change depending on the CSV we use makes us believe there is something else causing this.
If anyone has any insight as to what might be happening or what things we can check to try and fix this issue, we would be very grateful.
Re: Some products imported with CSV missing default name. price, reimporting doesn't help --multi-st
We've done further tests and discovered something extremely odd.
1st, the errors show up on our live web server with magento installed by hand, and also on a local PC under XAMPP using Bitnami's one-click magento installer.
2nd, we created a completely new CSV file by creating a test product inside Magento and exporting it. We then duplicated the rows in the CSV file and changed the SKUs so we had a test CSV with 300 unique SKUs. When we imported the test CSV, the following products all showed the no name/no price error, even though they were all just copy/pasted from the 1 original product:
There's a pattern to the products with errors. It occurs on #15, then #29 (+14), #43 (+14), then #58 (+15), then on the next 2 products 14 apart. Then it stops until product #115 and the pattern repeats, stops until #215 and repeats...
