Import EZ Realty Properties

Requirements

• CSVI Pro 4.3+
• EZ Realty 6.8.1
• Joomla 2.5+
• PHP 5.3+

Background information

This tutorial will explain how to import EZ Realty property information.

Open CSVI

Go to Components -> CSVI Pro and click on Process. You are now on the Process page from where the import and export happens.

Preparing the template

The next step is to select the Category import.

Under Manual import/export select:

1. Select Import
2. Select EZ Realty
3. Select Property import
4. Click on Go

Save the template by clicking on Save as new.

Setting the file options

The next step is to tell CSVI something about the file you want to import.

• Auto detect delimiters
  If your CSV file is using both the field delimiter and the text enclosure. You can set this to Yes otherwise it must be set to No and you can specify your own delimiters.
  
• I'm Mac
  This is only needed if you are using a Mac computer and your file might be using Mac line-endings as opposed to Windows or Linux line-endings.
• Use headers/nodes as configuration
  CSVI can read the fields you want to import from 2 locations:
  - Import file
  - Template fields
  If you set this to Yes, the first line from your import file will be used to read the fieldnames you want to import. If you set this to No, CSVI will use the fields you have specified on the fields tab. Important: the field names in your file must be valid CSVI fieldnames. Set this to No now for this tutorial.
• Skip first line
  This can be used if you let CSVI take the fields from the template and not from the file and your file has your own column headers.
• Overwrite existing data
  Overwrite existing data will overwrite all fields set in the import file for each product. If you set this to No, any existing product will be skipped if it exists.
• Ignore non-existing items
  If set to Yes, ignore non-existing items will not create any new products.
• Skip default value
  Default values set on the fields tab will not be used when set to Yes.
• Collect debug information
  This is a very important option. Setting this to Yes will tell CSVI to create a detailed log of all steps taken during import. This is a very useful report to find any potential problems. Whenever you post a question on the forum, make sure you post this file also. It is the only way to help you out. The How to collect debug information article explains this in further detail.

Now that the file options are set, CSVI knows how to read your file. Click on Save to save your changes in your template and make sure they don't get lost.

Adding the fields

The next step is to add the fields we want to import to our template. To import properties there are a few fields that are really needed:

• id
• category
• transaction_type
• market_status
• agent

Let's tell CSVI which fields you want to import.

1. Under the Field name column, select the field name
2. The other options we leave empty as they are fine
3. Click on the + symbol
4. Repeat step 1 - 3 for the description
5. Set the order of the fields in the Order column.
   
   1. This can be done manually by entering the correct order and then click Save
   2. This can be done automatically by clicking on the Reorder icon next to the Order

To make sure we don't lose anything, click on Save to save your template.

If you do not know which fieldnames to use, check out the Visual Available Fields.

The fields then look like this:

Creating the import file

With the template ready it is necessary to create our import file. You can create your import in almost any kind of spreadsheet or text editor. There are a few things to look out for though. The file must:

• be UTF-8 encoded
• have correct delimiters

Let's create our CSV file. We are going to import 2 categories.

"id";"image17";"category";"transaction_type";"market_status";"agent"
"1";"london.jpg";"London";"for auction";"LEASED";"admin"

Save these 2 lines in a file or download the file by clicking here.

Import time

With our template configured and our file created, we are ready to import.

On the source option we will load the file from our computer. Click on Browse and select your import file. The last thing that remains is to click on the Process button in the top right hand corner.

The result

When the import is done you will see a screen like this:

Here it says Updated but that can also be Added if the category doesn't exist yet. There you go, you have succesfully done an EZ Realty Property Import.

What's next?

The next thing you can do is, experiment. There are a lot of more features in CSVI you can use for example:

• Combine fields
• Replace fields

Further reading

Other good sources of information are:

• Troubleshooting guide
• Visual Available Fields
• Does my CSV file look correct?
• Incorrect column count