How to Increase the Max Length of the Product Description in Magento (when importing)?

Question

Edit: This was a bogus question. The problem was that I had quotes in my description field. The entire field should be wrapped in one set of quotes with none inside. Changed quotes to apostrophes to fix. Magento is working correctly.

I am using a Profile in the Import/Export section of my Magento admin to import a CSV document.

My description fields are very long (around 10k file size). Two issues are occurring:

1. On the published product, only the first 50% or so of the description is present.

2. The Magento system does not import the next column on the import document (brief description).

Does anybody know how to fix this?

Answer 1

The proplem is much more likley the application you export your product data with and which creates the CSV.

Did you check if the CSV contains the full description prior to importing it? Maybe the application only allows a certain amount of characters in a column and truncates the rest.

Answer 2

I believe I read there is a bug (not necessarily confirmed) in the CVS import if your 'short_description' is more than a sentence or two long, it causes problems elsewhere. You've got long, long descriptions, but you didn't mention how short, your short descriptions are. Could you try importing with a one sentence 'short_description', then see what happens.

I'm not sure the protocol of recommending a commercial product here, but there's a windows program (I run it in vmware) that does imports/exports with a direct connection to the magento database, skipping the long-winded dataflow api). I've imported products from there in much faster time frames without issue. I've never had to deal with long descriptions, though. It's not cheap at $200, but the time saved has been worth for it for me. It's the first result for 'magento manager' in google.

Have you confirmed by creating by hand a single product with a huge description that magento doesn't choke on it?