Import Explosions: how to calm the storm
So we recently started rebuilding our ProForm site (and by rebuilding I mean from the ground up...mostly), and lucky me I was placed on import duty. Well being the freakin' genius that I am I realized that .csv files for WorkoutWarehouse would likely work on Proform since we generally don't change them on the 6.0 stores (we tend to like to try to pretend we keep things standardized). So I grabbed me some WW goodness and commenced importing. I only had about 12 .csv files on me but it was enough to get a few products to test and build with.
Not long after the imports we noticed we couldn't add products to the shopping cart, we kept getting some bizzarre error saying that it couldn't resolve the product ID from the SKU.
MENTAL NOTE: when getting the aforementioned error check the "defining attributes"
I'd seen this error before on NordicTrack and I knew it has something to do with, you guessed it, the sku. However I was too involved in my own little world to do anything about it so Phil dug in and found that somehow our descriptive attributes from the .csv were placed in the wrong attributes section...instead they were placed as "defining attributes" which is bad because we all know that each defining attribute is a SKU. Once we deleted all defining attributes the products worked fine, however we were still stuck with the problem of what to do about the lousy imports that we would get should we try anymore .CSV's.
Turns out the answer is quite simple...there is a certain DTD (wcs.dtd) that needs to be defined to do what you want it to do and in our case on ProForm it was not defined so well. the trick here is to steal one you know works for the site you are on. Which brings me to the whole point of this post, all I really wanted to do was plaster this path somewhere else so when I run into this agian I have a better chance of stumbling onto a solution before it's too late. Sure I could go on about how to properly write a DTD and make it do what you want, but that would cut into my Reaper time?
the path you've all been waiting for, the path that contains all DTD's from WorkoutWarehouse to Proform and everything in Europe is:
\\wcdev\QIBM\UserData\WebSphere\AppServer\V6\ND\profiles\wcdev6\nulltemp\catalogimport
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.csv Import Hangs on Accelerator
Traditionally we've been having issues with .csv imports on Websphere 6.0. Normally we'd get about 12 products imported and on the next one Websphere will explode in a ball of fury sending flaming body parts all over the office (more precisely it hangs on the "please wait..." screen). As a work around I tried importing a file, then adding it to it's respective sales catalogs, this would typically take about 2 minutes at the most, then I'd wait for another 2-3 minutes before importing another file. by doing this I was able to import upwards of 18 products before the great explosion.
It's kind of a slow process and isn't so much a workaround as it is just delaying the inevitable but until further notice this is the best we have 
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