Magento – Categories Not Set Upon Product Import

I have set up a documentation of the product import format of Mage_ImportExport at http://www.integer-net.de/download/ImportExport_EN.pdf which describes in detail how to import for example images.

Regarding your problem: you need a few extra columns to add the image to the media gallery, otherwise it won't get imported:

"sku","image","small_image","thumbnail","_media_image","_media_attribute_id","_media_is_disabled","_media_position","_media_lable"
90048,"test.jpg","test.jpg","test.jpg","test.jpg",77,1,1,"Image 1"

Notes:

• The _media_attribute_id column requires the ID of the product attribute media_gallery. It can be obtained either from the admin panel or your custom modules using the expression Mage::getSingleton('catalog/product')->getResource()->getAttribute('media_gallery')->getAttributeId();

• The typing error _media_lable is intentional and hard-wired into Magento.

Meanwhile I have digged some further and it looks like more people have similar problems. Unfortunately there is nowhere a real clue why this kind of problems occur on some imports in the first place.

But there are workarounds. For the sake of completeness here two similar cases with similar workaround suggestions: Magento products not showing up after import https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12953584/product-is-not-displaying-in-listing-in-magento-after-import

Based on these threads and some other suggestions I found I now built a little PHP CLI script for my specific case which only adds the status and only when its missing:

require_once $pathToYourMagentoDirectory.'/app/Mage.php';
Mage::app();

$allProducts = Mage::getModel('catalog/product')->getCollection();
$count = 0;
foreach($allProducts as $product) {
    $currentStatus = Mage::getResourceModel('catalog/product')->getAttributeRawValue($product->getEntityId(), 'status');
    if ($currentStatus != 1 && $currentStatus != 2) {
        $product->setData('status', 1)->getResource()->saveAttribute($product, 'status');
        $count++;
    }
}
echo ('Fixed '.$count.' products by adding a valid status.');
echo ("\n");

In my case a SQL based fix like suggested in the comments above wouldn't have worked as catalog_product_entity_id simply had no entries for the newly imported products and the status attribute which could have been updated.

Still an odd problem and maybe there would be a better way to approach this - i. e. getting the initial import to work properly...