Luckily I came across a post on the Magento forums which details a method for bulk importing product attributes into Magento and although it did not allow me to automate the whole process, it was sufficient for my purposes.

The sample code provided in the post allows you to import multiple attributes into Magento but you have to create the attribute in Magento manually before you can import the values as the import does not create non-existing attibutes.  The other problem for me was that the sample code only allowed you to import one attribute at a time and then you had to edit files and id’s to do the next one.

As I had multiple attributes to import I tweaked the example code (you can download the tweaked code here) to allow me to import values for multiple attributes at one time.  I still had to create the attributes manually within Magento first but the tweaked code allowed me to import all my attributes values for multiple attributes at once.

In order to import the product attribute values you need to create files in your magento installation within the folder

/var/import/attributes/

The files need to be in the format of [attribute_id]_[attribute_name].csv i.e. 80_color.csv, 122_size.csv, techically the _[attribute_name] is not necessary but it helps to make identifying which attribute the file is for a whole lot easier.

Each value for the product attribute need to be in a separate line and the first line needs to contain the word “admin”.  For example, 80_color.csv contains:-

admin
Red
Blue
Green
Purple
Black

Once you have created the attribute files and copied to other files to their relevant locations you can then open ImpAttributes.php for your Magento installation in your browser i.e. http://www.mysite.com/ImpAttributes.php and all being good, your product attributes should be imported.

I have made the adapted product attributes import for Magento sample code available for download via the link below:-

Sample Code

This also contains a sample colours and sizes file

Importing Product Attributes into Magento – Sample Code

References

Bulk Import Attributes – Original solution provided by Srinigenie

I was asked to look into a problem with an automated stock level update script not updating the stock levels.  This update script was using the Magento API and on the face of things everything looked ok as the script ran without any errors, the product prices got updated but the stock levels never changed.

After a bit of investigating I found the problem was caused by an incorrect usage of the Magento API and the original update statement was similar to:-

$proxy->call($sessionId, 'product.update',
	array('PRD0001', 
		array(
			'price'=>12.50, 
			'qty'=>12, 
			'is_in_stock'=>1, 
			'discontinued'=>0
		)
	)
);

However, the update of the is_in_stock and qty fields is not done against the product (via product.update) but against the product inventory (via product_stock.update) so this code had to be updated to the following:-

// UPDATE THE PRODUCT
$proxy->call($sessionId, 'product.update',
	array('PRD0001', 
		array(
			'price'=>12.50, 
			'discontinued'=>0
		)
	)
);
 
// UPDATE THE PRODUCT INVENTORY
$proxy->call($sessionId, 'product_stock.update',
	array('PRD0001', 
		array(
			'qty'=>12, 
			'is_in_stock'=>1, 
		)
	)
);

After the stock level update script had been adapted to this 2 step approach everything seemed to run ok and the stock level figures were then being updated with the appropriate quantities.