How we integrated Rapnet & IDEX 2,00,000 Diamond records in a Jooma VirtueMart e-shop
Joomla an open source and free Content Management system when teams up with VirtueMart an e-commerce component of Joomla; makes a powerful combination. A Popular choice for jewelry diamond e-commerce stores.
Our Challenge : Add 200K diamond records
Our challenge was to integrate more than 200,000 Diamond records from Rapnet, IDEX and Polygon in Joomla+virtualmark to create a fast diamond search engine.
The diamond search skims through thousands of diamond records to filter stones on various criterions including Shape, Polish, Symmetry, Fluorescence, Clarity, Cut and Grade.
Coding and Approach :
VirtueMart ecommerce extension installed on Joomla creates separate tables to add product details. From backend admin a user can insert products one by one or for bulk insert Virtuemart has a native functionality through csv format uploads.
Our initial approach was to insert more than 200K diamond records which are available in csv dumps but could not; as it contains many diamond specific attributes which were alien to Virtuemart table structure eg. diamond shape, cut, polish symmetry etc.
To handle these ; use of virtuemart custom attributes was done. These were initially created from backend and then an attempt was done to insert csv records. However it was erroring out.
TPS team further did an indepth study of VirtueMart table structure. In virtuemart a single entry of the product adds entries in 4 tables including
- virtuemart_products_en_gb
- virtuemart_products
- virtuemart_customs
- virtuemart_products_customfields
Adding almost additional 10-12 diamond related custom fields within these and inserting data through csv was creating memory rundown issues. To counter this completely separate queries were written for data insert but overall emulating the VirtueMart approach.
The result was a blazing fast diamond search engine.
For More info contact: [email protected]
