Virtuemart Manufacturer Import

[shieldselectronics]

My experience with trying to import Manufacturers into Virtuemart ...

Downloaded CSVI, Installed it - spent more than half a day perusing their forums and the site looking for documentation.
I did manage to find some very well hidden and sometimes cryptic explanations of how to use CSVI to import manufacturers into a multi language Virtuemart:
http://www.csvimproved.com/csvi-documentation/tutorials/csvi-5/875-import-manufacturers-in-a-multi-lingual-virtuemart-shop

I ignored the language aspect and used the "information" as a guide towards my goal.

Found a few other links on their site that I thought would be useful:
http://www.csvimproved.com/frequently-asked-questions/236-does-my-csv-file-look-correct
http://www.csvimproved.com/visual-available-fields/virtuemart

There's a ton of back and forth on the forums about collecting the Debug information during import...so that the developer can look over it and from what i've seen usually not give a clear answer.
There's a lot of discussion of custom fields, shopper group imports, etc...not formatted in a very easy to understand way, IMO. And I hadn't even gotten to the point of actually being able to focus on products, since i was stuck at not even being able to get my manufacturers imported easily.

I followed as many of the directions as I could in hopes it would work, reformatted my CSV file 7 different ways, imported and reimported over and over..it just plain failed.

So after about 5 hours of screwing with CSVI...I bit the bullet and went with CSVadvanced.

Installed it, a lot of the menu choices made sense given the number of hours I had plowed through CSVI they had almost identical wording and apparent functionality.
So, using my already formatted CSV file, I set up a couple of parameters in CSVA and attempted the import.

It takes what seems to be a lifetime with just the spinning blue wheel...never seems to time out. Finally, I opened a new window and hopped on over to phpmyadmin to check out the manufacturer table and lo and behold....SUCCESS!

I go back to my CSVadvanced window and it's still spinning, but since I've verified it worked, I just hit cancel.

Now however, I have a new issue...from all of the attempts with CSVI my manufacturer ID's don't begin at 1. CSVA assigned them starting at something like 2000. So to correct this, once again I go back to phpmyadmin and go to the manufacturer table and see that there is an auto increment function setup for the ID. Try as I might, I could not reset the number.. So out of desperation, I dropped the ID field, reset it back up with autoincrement and deleted all the manufacturers.

I then proceed to reimport using CSVAdvanced and once again spinning blue circle but it also still works, however, this time I notice there is an additional manufacturer ID but with no name...it's blank?

So I delete the blank one and almost immediately another blank manufacturer shows up with the next ID number. This goes on for about 10 more attempts. Finally I login to Virtuemart Admin, go to the Manufacturers Control Panel page and proceed to try and delete the newly created blank manufacturer a couple of times. Same result...

So I logged out completely of Joomla and phpmyadmin. Go back into Joomla/Virtuemart, attempt to delete the blank one and it works!

Except now I have 188 manufacturers with IDs of 1-188 and the auto increment is set to assign 197 as the next manufacturer added. I don't plan on trying the drop Manufacturer ID thing again. I'm sure there's a far more effective way to reset the autoincrement than simply using phpmyadmin.

Sorry for the long winded post, but I haven't found any information in any forums, blogs or otherwise that detail actually importing Manufacturers. So I thought if some one was doing a search for Virtuemart Manufacturer Import as I was, maybe this info will help

I'll report back as I move on to the 114,000 product import using CSVadvanced.

EDIT: Using Virtuemart 2.0.20b and Joomla 2.5.8