Product Import Creating Additional Categories

[Design2Please]

Hi,

 

I have been using the product import feature to add EANs to my products and for some reason the import seems to be creating a lot of top level categories with numbers for names e.g. 4552. There should only be 6 top level categories and currently it is showing over 1500 with the import still processing.

 

My import file only had 2 fields product reference and EAN and I used the product sample file from prestashop to generate the import file so as to make sure the format is correct. I made sure that I chose Products as the entity and selected use product reference as the Key. The preview file looked correct on the next page and I selected the relevant headers "Reference #" and "EAN13" from the dropdowns.

 

There are only 2 columns in the import file and neither relate to any category fields so cannot see what is causing all the additional categories to be created. The named of the created categories do not match any of the product reference numbers, so it is not using that and the EANs seem to be populating correctly on the products so it is recognising both columns as the correct product fields.

 

When the import is finished I will have thousands of additional categories to delete and no idea what has caused them to be generated by the import in the first place.

 

Has anyone else had a similar issue or no how it can be solved?

 

Thanks in advance.

 

Jon

 

 

Edited November 5, 2016 by Design2Please (see edit history)

[Design2Please]

I managed to solve this issue in the end.

 

I had deleted multiple categories directly in the database (ps_category table) but had forgotten to also delete those categories products associations in the ps_category_product table

 

This meant that each time I ran import the categories I thought I had deleted were being created again as the database still saw them as having products associated to the.

 

I have now made sure that all references to the deleted categories have been removed from all category related tables in the database (ps_category, ps_category_group, ps_category_lang, ps_category_product and ps_category_shop tables) and now I am able to import without any issues.