Create Multiple Products in Magento - magento

Question

I'm working on magento using Magento 1.X API. I want to create products in magento so I'm using catalogProductCreate method to create.
This is working great when it is around 5 to 10 products, but when trying to insert multiple products it is taking a lot of time.
Is there any method to insert bulk products at a time.

Answer 1

The API/programmatic/dataflow method of adding products in Magento is notoriously slow when dealing with large data sets.
If you haven't already looked at it, try Magmi - it is the missing piece of Magento catalogue management. You can add/update thousands of products in minutes with spreadsheets. It can also be called on CLI which opens up lots of excellent automation possibilities.
Oh, and best of all - it's free.
https://github.com/dweeves/magmi-git

Answer 2

I've been using this code to add/update products on Magento.
<?php
include_once("app/Mage.php");
Mage::app();
umask(0);
Mage::app()->setCurrentStore(Mage::getModel('core/store')->load(Mage_Core_Model_App::ADMIN_STORE_ID));
$counter = 0;
I have this function to get (or create) a product by SKU:
function GetProduct($sku)
{
global $counter;
echo $sku;
$p = Mage::getModel('catalog/product');
$productId = $p -> getIdBySku($sku);
if($productId)
{
echo "!";
$p -> load( $productId );
}
else
{
$p->setTypeId('simple');
$p->setVisibility(Mage_Catalog_Model_Product_Visibility::VISIBILITY_BOTH);
$p->setStatus(1);
$p->setTaxClassId(7);
$p->setWebsiteIDs(array(1));
$p->setStoreIDs(array(1));
$p->setAttributeSetId(4);
$p->setSku($sku);
}
echo "...";
$counter++;
echo " ".$counter;
return $p;
}
Here's the function to save the product:
function SaveProduct($p)
{
try
{
if (is_array($errors = $p->validate()))
{
$strErrors = array();
foreach($errors as $code=>$error)
{
$strErrors[] = ($error === true)? Mage::helper('catalog')->__('Attribute "%s" is invalid.', $code) : $error;
echo $strErrors[0];
}
$this->_fault('data_invalid', implode("\n", $strErrors));
}
$p->save();
echo "\n";
}
catch (Mage_Core_Exception $e)
{
$this->_fault('data_invalid', $e->getMessage());
}
}
And finally I'm calling like this:
$product = GetProduct('sku1');
$product->setData('thumbnail_label', 'sku1');
SaveProduct($product);
unset($product);
$product = GetProduct('sku2');
$product->setData('url_path', 'plastic-hat.html');
SaveProduct($product);
unset($product);
$product = GetProduct('sku3');
$product->setData('thumbnail_label', 'sku3');
SaveProduct($product);
unset($product);
$product = GetProduct('sku4');
$product->setData('thumbnail_label', 'sku4');
SaveProduct($product);
unset($product);
$product = GetProduct('sku5');
$product->setData('thumbnail_label', 'sku5');
SaveProduct($product);
unset($product);
I run this code from the command-line as there is a memory leak running it this way. You can only get so many products updated before it blows the memory and you have to edit and re-run the code to keep going, but it works and it's relatively fast.