This topic contains 14 replies, has 4 voices, and was last updated by 
Stiofan O’Connor 7 years, 6 months ago.
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Open Support TicketTagged: business hours, hours
Hi GD,
Apologies for posting here for a 3rd party GD add-on, but I haven’t been getting good support from them so I’m hoping there’s another solution.
For Business Hours add-on, we need a way to import/export CSV files. I posted about it here but never got a reply: https://wpgeodirectory.com/support/topic/business-hours-2/
Recently there was a bug with Business Hours after a GD Core update. This was fixed but as a result all of our Business Hours data for each listing was wiped. We had to hire people to manually enter business hours for each listing, and now all of their work is lost. If there had been a way to import/export Business Hour fields through CSV, then we would’ve had this all backed-up. Now we must re-do it entirely for 300 listings.
Is there any way the GD team can make the GD import/export function work with these new fields as well? Or is there something I can do to fix it for myself at least? It’s already possible to import some of the fields, as I mentioned in my post linked above, but this didn’t work for all fields, and we also need a way to export hour fields.
Thank you!
Frank, to be clear, there’s no way the data could have been wiped out by the change in GeoDirectory. There was also no bug in Business Hours. You may think it’s semantics but it’s important.
GeoDirectory unexpectedly changed how a key function worked, which caused Business Hours to not display properly. It didn’t affect the data in any way.
If your data was lost, it was some other process that caused it. I’ve updated GeoDirectory and all of it’s plugins, and my Business Hours on several sites for clients and nobody has lost any data.
I expect to have an export option done shortly. In the meantime, any normal backup of your WordPress site & database would have contained the business hours data as it is stored in the post_meta table. You could restore that backup to another database to recover your work.
Thanks for the reply, Jeff, and for the update on import/export functionality.
If it wasn’t from those updates, then something else around the same time still caused all of our manually entered business hours to be wiped. Regardless of the cause, I hope you understand how incredibly frustrating this would be for any of your customers.
My only other guess of what else happened around the same time that could have caused this was an update to add GD Neighborhood data using CSV export & import for listings. If this is what caused us to lose many hours of manual data entry into your add-on, then that’s still equally disappointing from our end.
I don’t think our team has the capacity to get only the business hour fields out of our backups and replace that part of the post_meta table. The data for many other fields of our businesses have been changed since then by our listing owners and I wouldn’t want to risk losing more data.
You said you’re working on an export option, which is greatly appreciated. Will there also be a way to import data for Business Hours fields, or is there already one? I asked about this in the other forum but never got a reply, but I’ve been able to import certain fields by adding new CSV columns like “sunday_open” and “sunday_close”, but this only works for a few of the Business Hour fields, not all.
Jeff, is there a way to import data from CSV for Business Hour fields at the moment? I’m confused about why I can get this to work for certain Business Hour fields but not for others, by adding new CSV columns with the Business Hours field names, like “sunday_open”.
Thanks,
Frank
Business hours uses the standard WordPress custom fields feature. If you export via WORDPRESS, then the data is likely maintained.
Sorry, maybe I wasn’t clear.
I was asking if I could IMPORT, using the GD’s built-in import/export tool.
I was able to figure it out. I added column headers (“sunday_open” “sunday_close”, etc.)
in the CSV file to listings, in new columns to the right of all the listing data and images. Doing this, I can quickly import data for your fields for all my listings.
This is a great feature that I think more of your users can benefit from. For instance, now that I can import data from CSV, instead of manually converting all the GD plain text business hours to the many open/close fields for your add-on, I can just send a CSV file with plain text hours to a virtual assistant (like Mechanical Turk) and have them format them under the proper fields and with consistent formatting for each day open/close.
I also found a huge bug in Business Hours which is what caused all my data to be wiped. If I use GD’s built-in import/export function to update my listings, as many GD members do quite frequently, it will wipe all the data for Business Hours fields. Since column headers for Business Hours fields aren’t included in the CSV export, when we update the doc and import it with updated data, it assumes that the values for all business hours fields are blank.
There must be some way to integrate your fields with the GD import/export function to fix this, and at the same time this would be very helpful for us to be able to update our business hours more quickly. When I add new custom fields for GD listings, they automatically appear in GD CSV exports, so I’m not sure why yours don’t.
Anyways, thanks for the replies and support, Jeff. I apologize if I came off as rude in other replies, but I was obviously very very frustrated from losing many hours of manual work because of this issue. Overall, we’re quite happy with the added functionality of your add-on, but we’re hugely limited until this import/export bug can be fixed.
Thanks!
Frank, let’s be clear here. There is NO BUG like this in Business Hours.
When you do an IMPORT of listings, it’s creating a NEW listing. So the data on the old listing is left behind.
In my research the GeoDirectory export/import doesn’t have any hooks or methods of connecting to the process, so I can’t latch on.
If Stiofan can correct me, or do something about it, then I can fix it.
I am not using one of the custom fields in GD like you say because there wasn’t an option to a the type of field I would need. I’m still not sure it can be done today.
I welcome their input.
Ok, then it’s not a bug, it’s that Business Hours is not compatible with a core tool of GD. Many GD users rely on GD import/export to update their listings, so it’s an important issue.
And I’m not sure how it works from GD’s back-end, but when I use GD’s import function in WP, it gives me the option to “Update listing if post with post_id already exists” and it keeps all its reviews and other info when I do these updates. Business Hours fields are the only data that disappear.
Stiofan previously added a column for “Claimed” to the CSV import/export because it was missing, so hopefully he can do something similar for this issue so that these fields appear for anyone with the Business Hours add-on.
Looking forward to a solution.
Has Stiofan or anyone else from GD Support seen this thread? Are there any solutions possible from the GD side?
@jeff, get me on skype and we can talk solutions if u want.
Stiofan
Thanks Stiofan! Greatly appreciate you looking into this!
Has this been resolved? I am holding off purchasing Business Hours until I know it is fully compatible again.
Thanks.
I’ve implemented code to move the Business Hours from the current location into the proper GeoDirectory custom fields, for existing users.
I need to catch up with Stiofan to see why the fields are not located in the export.
Thanks Jeff. Let us know when it is good to go.
@jeff, u have me on skype 🙂
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