Dataflow Spreadsheet Upload Error

For all of it’s problems and shortcomings, Magento Dataflow can still be very useful when it comes to the mass upload of data to your website. Being a Magento developer can sometimes feel like being a doctor of an ill patient, constantly having to come up with cures to a range of unknown illnesses. I promise I’m going somewhere with this…

A recent attempt to upload 1,090 products ended abruptly and disappointingly with an inexplicable error. The error came about because there were non UTF-8 characters somewhere in the document which I currently had open in the Spreadsheet program on Open Office. If there’s 20 products it won’t take long to find them, if there’s 1,090 it may take slightly longer…

The error that’s produced read like this:

Notice: unserialize() [function.unserialize]: Error at offset 209 of 247 bytes in /var/www/vhosts/wcshop.co.uk/httpdocs/app/code/core/Mage/Dataflow/Model/Batch/Abstract.php on line 66

My solution was to open the file in Notepad and simply re-save the file in there in UTF-8 format, but you can also do this in Open Office too. It will convert the problematic characters into the correct UTF-8 alternatives.

This was my solution for a site using 1.4.0.1 – the folks at Magento have improved the error reporting for version 1.4.1 + in that you’re actually told which column has been effected by the non-UTF-8 character, which obviously makes diagnosis a lot easier. I think this patient is slowly getting better!