Earlier this year, you wrote a datamigration script for oscommerce 2.3 for us. This works very well. But we're looking at extending the functionality. Please allow me to elaborate on this.
Several online shops want to use a copy of the main database for the products, categories and manufacturers. We could use your script for this, but unfortunately, the script only works when the tables are truncated and filled again. Some tables (mainly the products table) contain valuable information for some of the reports these shop owners need. We're therefore looking into extending the functionality with update statements for existing products so we can keep the data to report on, and insert statements for new products.
Some shop owners need to add products they've created themselves/bought elsewhere. But as osCommerce generates it's products_id's automatically, there is a chance that the products entered manually at one of the daughter shops will be overwritten by the data coming from the main database. This holds for categories and manufacturers as well. I tried to add some categories and products, by creating a category/manufacturer/product with id 999999. Adding subsequent objects in the db automatically generates id's based on the manually entered ID (so 1000000 and so on). This is OK, but what happens when I run the script to update/insert products from the mother DB? So the import script should take into account that products entered manually remain in the database. I will make sure the selected ID of the manually entered products are high enough to not cause conflicts.
What would be the effort/cost to rewrite the script to make this possible.
Next to that, as an extention of the above, we'd like to be able to select the manufacturers that need to be migrated and enter a price markup for each of the selected manufacturers. We don't want to do this each and every time, so the initial setup and changes thereafter need to be saved somewhere. As 8 websites will be using the main database as a base for their catalogue, the selections of which manufacturers need to be set, need to be saved per website.
If should be possible to run the update/insert process through a cron job.