Issue when importing

As you know, in my latest posts i've been talking about an installation of hikashop with something about 10k products, ok, actually i'm working on it actively, and i'm working veeeery hard on the csv structure and all this mass import of products, images, etc. being the main interest in doing all this the idea to connect Hikashop to some kind ofPOS system. I know that this is not an easy road but i'm very happy i'm working on that.

I want to share information about the troubles i find while working on this.

My integration is as simple as possible, i will only, in this first phase, put a lot of products with just one characteristic in a lot of different categories and i hope to be able to update just the product price and product quantity based on the product id and product code on the ****_hikashop_product table, i'll be talking about this in the future, by now i'm just importing all the products and automating the characteristics creation as i explained before in this post and making a lot of csv's

Whatever, i want to report that there is an extrange behavior when importing your products with variants with the csv import.

My case was this, i have imported a product with a csv like this:

"product_id","product_parent_id","product_name","product_quantity","product_code","product_type","categories","price_value","price_currency_id","images","Dim. Base"
599,0,"CANDELIERE CENTRALE 60 Gradi INOX ",-1,,"main",18,10,"EUR","prodotti/ancoraggio/basi/EUH0221A.jpg","7/8 in."
600,599,,-1,"EUH0221A ","main",,10,"EUR",,"7/8 in."
601,599,,-1,"EUH0223A ","variant",,20,"EUR",,"1 in. "
602,599,,-1,"EUM0221A ","variant",,30,"EUR",,"22mm "
603,599,,-1,"EUM0223A ","variant",,40,"EUR",,"25mm "

as you see there are 2 "main" products that will crash everything when you import, the fact is that it actually writes that data in the database and if you change that problem in the csv and reimport this:

"product_id","product_parent_id","product_name","product_quantity","product_code","product_type","categories","price_value","price_currency_id","images","Dim. Base"
599,0,"CANDELIERE CENTRALE 60 Gradi INOX ",-1,,"main",18,10,"EUR","prodotti/ancoraggio/basi/EUH0221A.jpg","7/8 in."
600,599,,-1,"EUH0221A ","variant",,10,"EUR",,"7/8 in."
601,599,,-1,"EUH0223A ","variant",,20,"EUR",,"1 in. "
602,599,,-1,"EUM0221A ","variant",,30,"EUR",,"22mm "
603,599,,-1,"EUM0223A ","variant",,40,"EUR",,"25mm "

It won't accept the change... you need to go directly to the database and remove the product manually from the ****_hikashop_product table and then reimport everything, no matter if you cancel the product from the listing in the hikashop backend


I hope HS team works a little bit on the import/export zone of the program.

mmm, i'm on 1.5.8, i hope everything goes ok when upgrading.

Thanks in advance