Mass import custom attributes Magento

Question

I was wondering if anybody has ever tried to mass import custom attributes into a Magento Database before? My client has a Magento store that specialises in selling musical instruments, and wishes to add a Google Shopping Feed (using the extension of that name by Rocket Web) to sell the products on Google Shopping. The problem is that i need both an MPN (Manufacturer Product Number) and a Brand (so for instance Gibson) for the shopping feed to work, both of which are not automatically uploaded by the stores POS system.

The way that the POS system currently works is when a product is added, the title / SKU number / description / price etc are all uploaded to the Magento store, which means the client does not need to add the product twice. The problem is that as MPN and Brand aren't necessarily out of the box attributes, the POS system does not upload either of these to Magento, and therefore I now have 1,000 products without them and they are apparently crucial to the Google Shopping Feed extension.

I'm currently working on getting a table of each of the products SKU, MPN and Brands from the local database of the POS system (of which each of the products has all 3), but once i have it my question is this: is there a simple way for me to reference the products currently in the Magento database (most likely by SKU, as both databases contain the same SKU for each of the items) and apply two custom fields to each of the products: MPN and Brand? I've created custom 'MPN' and 'cat-brand' attributes (which i can use the Google Shopping Feed to map to the custom attributes) and looked inside the Magento database but i cant find them anywhere, but i found a table called 'catalog_product_flat_1', which i imagine is a flat DB used for indexing or something, but it looks perfect for achieving what i want, in that i could easily search for SKU and apply two custom attributes as columns for each product. Something tells me it isn't going to be that easy though.

Any thoughts would be a great help, thanks for your time.

Answer 1

Magento uses an EAV data model, which means your attributes are broken up into multiple tables. Take a look at any tables with 'entity', 'eav', 'attribute', or 'value' in their name if you want an idea of how it all works.

What you're probably looking for is catalog_product_entity_varchar or catalog_product_entity_text. In those tables, entity_id is your product ID number (different from SKU, but you can link a product_id to a SKU) and attribute_id corresponds to the eav_attribute table.

In short, what you want to do is look at your eav_attribute table, pull the entity_type_id, attribute_id fields for your MPN and cat-brand attributes you made, and then you can insert your data into catalog_product_entity_varchar. (or _text if your attributes use that instead)