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Requests

Bulk import of products and configurable options

James Miller shared this idea 4 years ago
Under Consideration

So one thing that is frustrating about any billing system we have used is the inability to bulk import products and their respective configurable options. Here's how we would envision this working:

Product:

Using a spreadsheet with the required fields of the product screen, we would input all of the information. Price, term, product name, label, module (if required), etc. We would have one product per line. Import that into the system and whola, now you have created 10, 20, 50 new products.

Configurable options:

Now this is where things may get a bit challenging. Obviously it would be difficult if not impossible to be able to link these directly to the products you just imported above, however, I do believe that you could still utilize this functionality in mass uploading configurable options.

Again, using a spreadsheet, you would utilize all of the fields from the configurable options screen you would input your options. Now this would create the configurable options group and you'd still have to go back into the main product you want to associate this to and add it, but it would certainly speed up the process of server hardware change out in your billing system as well as reduce the amount of repetitive clicks you have to do just to create a product grouping.

Yes there is still some manual intervention, as there should be. It should not be completely automated. This will require you to double check a bit and make sure it imported the way you needed/expected it to.

Comments (2)

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@James Miller:

I believe part of you are proposing can be done by using the import plugin from Blesta. It has a CSV option for importing clients.

https://docs.blesta.com/display/user/CSV

It only import clients and not any products or invoices.

What I would like to see it something a little bit more flexible. Inspiration can come from our Cerb Packages:

https://cerb.ai/guides/packages/building/

https://cerb.ai/guides/packages/importing/

You can import a JSON file which allows you to be much more descriptive in your importing. If anything, all the other importers (WHMCS, Blesta 2.x, etc.) should follow into this package/json format. The benefits of using the JSON package format inspired by Cerb is that you can make call backs within the package file. The pages linked above talk about this in more detail with the {{{text}}} options.

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Thinking about this, I'd like to have an export and import option for both Configurable Options, and Packages. We'd export as JSON data, and allow importing similar to importing of themes. I suppose this could support bulk-imports also of more than 1 item at a time, but it would also allow the sharing of import files for common configurations to aid in getting up and running more quickly.

Thoughts?