Update existing nodes with fields from XML or CSV

Question

There are 2 greate modules for importing nodes Feeds and Feed Import. Is there a way to update fields of existing nodes on import from XML or CSV file?

For example, there is an XML feed from another website with products (id + price) and file with additional data for the same products (id + description). How to import both sources into the same node in Drupal?

Answer 1

You need to set up feeds and feeds_xpathparser. You could found a good start for configuring all this here : http://www.drupalprogrammer.co.uk/2012/12/use-feeds-module-to-import-xml-data-in.html

Concerning your concern about updating, you can do this by configuring the guid as your external unique id. In the screenshot provided, you can see in my case the xml tag used for unique id is simply <id>.

Then, you just have to configure the node processor so that it will "Update existing node" when it found a duplicate as shown on the screenshot below.

Answer 2

You should know the nid to be able to import this product.

In node import when you add the nid to the csv it understand that there is an update, but you should try it, maybe it delete all the content but not the information from the csv.

The best options in this case should be to make a bacthapi process to update all the nodes.

Oskar