Screen: ShopSite > Utilities > Database > Upload/Download

Database Upload/Download

Use ShopSite’s database upload and download functions to put copies of your store’s databases on your local computer, and to upload information to your store. Uploading a database lets you build all or part of your store from virtually any spreadsheet or database program. In fact, with two carefully constructed databases, you can build a complete store with two quick uploads, without having to enter a single product or page description manually in the ShopSite interface.

To download a database:

You can download the database as a tab-delimited text file, an XML file, or in "QuickBooks for Windows" import file format.

1. Select the database to download:

    

   • Products — Information about all products in your store

    

   • Pages — Information about all pages in your store

    

   • Orders — Information about orders received by your store.

    

   • Associates — Information about associates configured in your store
2. Click Download

 

3. On the Database Download screen, Select the download format and options.

 

4. Select which database fields you want to download. You can download all the fields, or indicate specific fields. If you will be using the same custom field set several times, you may want to create a fieldmap that you can select, rather than having to select the individual fields every time you download.

 

5. Choose to either download the file to your local computer (browser), or save the file on the server that hosts your store.

 

6. Specify the file name and extension.

 

7. Click Proceed.

 

To upload a database:

You can upload databases that you have previously downloaded, or you can upload databases that you have created with a program on your local computer, such as a spreadsheet or database program. The databases must be in ShopSite's XML format, or a delimted-text format for uploading, such as a tab-delimited file.

1. If you are not uploading a database that you previously downloaded, use a spreadsheet or database program to create a database of either product or page information. You can even use a text editor or word processor if you know how to create a tab-delimited file. You can create multiple databases, such as one for each category of products that you sell in your store. (ShopSite has only one products database and one pages database. If you maintain multiple page or product files for uploading, ShopSite will combine them into the single database when they are uploaded.) See Database Upload Fields for details about the fields and values to include in each database.

Note:

In a spreadsheet program, the first row of your file must have a column for each field and each column must contain the name of that field. All other rows should contain page or product data, and must have the same number of columns as the first row. Some applications, such as Microsoft Excel, may not export tabs for empty columns at the end of a data row (for example, if you are only uploading a few fields for some products), and ShopSite will not import the file. You can work around this problem by adding a "junk" column at the end of the real data and always having a value in that colum for each product/page. When you import the data, set ShopSite to ignore the "junk" data field.

 

Use the following strings for special characters within fields. ShopSite will convert these strings to the correct characters during the upload.

Character	String
new line	|n|
carriage return	|r|
tab	|t|

 

2. Save the database as a tab-delimited text file. (You can choose a different delimiter, but ShopSite is expecting the Tab character as the default.)

 

3. From the Database Upload/Download screen, select the database to upload, either products or pages. You cannot upload the Orders or Associates databases.

 

4. Click Upload.

 

5. Specify the file to upload, then indicate the field and item separators, if you are not using the default. Click Proceed to continue.

 

6. Match the fields in your file with ShopSite database fields.

 

7. View the results of the upload.

the Update Links button allows you to manually update the associations between databases. The main reason you would use this button is if you uploaded a batch of files into a single database. By deferring the linking until all the files in the database have been uploaded, you can save considerable time when working with large databases.

ShopSite Help and Resource Center Last updated: July 11, 2005 Give Feedback

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