EasyCart v4.0 order export format totally different now, kinda breaks our system

[vtowel]

Hi guys,

I like the new interface for EasyCart - it's about time you ditched the Flash interface! So thanks, finally we'll be able to do shop admin from a tablet or phone. Long time coming, I imagine.

However, I see that exporting order data is quite different now compared to the last version, which looks like it's gonna be a bit of a pain for us to adjust to. We've got a spreadsheet system set up to take the EasyCart orders export file and enable us to do detailed analyses of order data, which is pretty essential for our day-to-day business operations. Quite regularly we need to filter orders by product, specific product attributes, and customers, and provide us a summary of quantities, revenues, and that sort of thing. So we've been taking the raw export file (an .xls file up till now) and using a Google Sheets interface we built to give us that information. It's been working great for the past couple years, and has delivered accurate and incredibly useful data (which, by the way, WooCommerce was totally messing up, prior to switching to EasyCart).

But now, the structure of the order data in the export file has changed. For one, it's a .csv instead of an .xls, which isn't a problem. Google Sheets imports both formats so that's fine. Secondly, the column order is all switched around. Again, I can adjust all my spreadsheet code to accommodate that new ordering; it'll take us some time to figure out but it's not the end of the world.

What I don't get is: Why, now, does only the first 'orderdetail' row of every order contain the full order details in it? The subsequent 'orderdetail' rows, for whatever reason, have '0.00' for tons of the fields, like order_date, order_status, payment_method, sub_total, order_customer_notes, and so on. The customer details seems to be intact, but none of the rest of the properties of the order are there. They all get replaced with '0.00'. What's the deal?

When we filter the data provided by EasyCart by, say, a product ID, it's essential that the rows returned by that query have all the order information intact, not just a reference to the order ID. As it stands now, I'd have to come up with some crazy spreadsheet lookup code to take every row that has blank fields and repopulate them with data from another row, before we can even make use of this data. I'd really prefer not to have to do that.

Is there any way you can fix this problem so that all the order data is intact for every row, and not arbitrarily skipped?

Thanks a lot for all your hard work,
Paul

[vtowel]

Hey stompin,

Actually I ended up spending a few hours yesterday developing a completely different system that doesn't involve the CSV export file at all, since we couldn't wait. So not to worry. But thanks for your input.

[jjones]

Just an FYI, it's interesting topic. We have actually gone back and forth with the exporter, some who need to have it by line item, others who need to have every item listed. I personally liked having it with one row of totals, then subsequent rows as just appended items to them, but I can move around excel pretty good to. It also helped to do quick additions to rows and dates if they don't all have a repeating similar information, which then you have to do vlookups in excel to start to categorize them and lump them by orders....

I know what might be nice now that we have it more modular is to offer various types of exports, but then we get into a report writer, which we just don't have resources to do. I know it would start out with a coupe simple options, but really needs to be built extensively to be done right or else we just get more folks saying they need it exported their way...

In the end, it's kind of a compromise to what we think would work best for most users. If I was probably in your situation and it's not the way you need it, try just exporting directly from phpmyadmin and the database, might give you more of an export that fits your needs?

do other usrs know of a good plugin for wordpress that lets you build export data? seems like a good plugin should be made somewhere to do that?

[vtowel]

Don't worry about it jjones. I got it figured out via PHP and accessing the DB directly. Thanks!