Americart Data Upload Form
[Used if you wish to generate Americart enabled product pages
from a database export or plain text file, or use our product search
engine.]
The full documentation for this suite of features is here.
Cart-id: Your cart-id code. It begins with "a-", "p-", or "s-" and is
followed by four numbers. Examples: a-1358 p-1000
BBS Password: The password for your BBS account on cartserver. This is NOT your
cart password. Your cart account is on a different machine, and we don't
share the passwords across the local net. Since the bbs is on the same
physical machine, we use that instead. Your BBS is at http://bbs.cartserver.com/bbs/[a or p or s]/[1234 (your cart number)]/index.cgi .
You will want to go to your bbs, administrator section, and set a password. If you
haven't set one previously, your "Old Password" will be blank.
Basename: This will be both the name of the html pages
generated (basename_01.html,basename_02.html...) and the search
engine category name. Legal here are
a-z A-Z 0-9 dash, and underscore. Tip: Underscore will map to a space
in the search engine category name. Example: VHS_video_cassettes
Rules File: This is a .txt file that resides on your computer.
It contains rules and properties to apply to the data to be uploaded.
You must customize the template rules file to
match your data and desired display characteristics. You can have
a different rules file for each data file you will want to upload.
CSV File: This is the data file that resides on your computer.
It is usually type .csv, and is created by doing a "save as..." or
"export as..." from MS Excel or "Access to Excel to csv", or other spreadsheet/dbase.
You select file type csv (comma separated). Here is a
sample.
Don't have a database? No problem. You can make a .CSV file with
any good text editor. We recommend the freeware editor Wordtabs.
If using WordTabs, be sure to pull down "Tools...Options...Click the
"general" tab, and UNcheck "RTF is default Format". This editor is
GREAT freeware, although the author has moved on to other things.
Operation to perform: Select what you wish to do with your data.
preview: This is the mode to preview what the end result
of the data processing will look like. You keep using this mode as you modify
your rules file until it shapes your data into pages just the way you want
them.
preview source: Use this when you are having problems in preview
mode and you can't figure it out without seeing the generated html code.
build search database: This will process your CSV file into
our database system for use with our product search engine. It's important
to have your rules right for this also, since those rules will be applied
to the search result. If you've done this step, you can find the html
code for your search box at http://search.cartserver.com/search?a-XXXX (your
cart-id in place of a-XXXX). An example is here.
download zip: After you've got things right in preview mode,
select this option to get back a zip file containing all your generated
html pages. You can unzip this file and have your product pages ready
to upload to your website for people to browse!
display existing databases: This is how you can view and delete
uploaded search data that you don't need from our server. Please delete old test
data or any uploaded
data you don't need. The space you save may be your own!!!!