Navigate to /dashboard/database_import using the dashboard button at the right top of the screen.

Scroll down to the upload section and select a SQL file to upload. Give your new database connection a name. Then click the upload button.

After successfully uploading, you can import the database dump file. Click the import Button. You will be redirected when the process has finished.

Your new database will now appear as new connection, when you go to /dashboard/database_import. From there you can import tables.

For the next steps to import the tables from your connected database follow the import tables tutorial.

Navigate to /dashboard/database_import using the dashboard button at the right top of the screen.

Type in the credentials to access a database on a different server. All SQL based databases should work. A connected database makes sense if a substantial part of product information or other mass content is available. This way you can use the connected database as an updateable source for its express objects. Just keep in mind that an update overrides user changes to express object attribute values. New values need to be translated after an update. Alternatively you can keep everything separated and use all import features with a SQL dump import.

For the next steps to import the tables from your connected database follow the import tables tutorial.

Scroll to the table import form and check all tables you want to import as objects. Tables that have associations to other tables show a second option for keeping foreign keys. If you check this option, the table and all associated tables will be imported and the express objects will have the same associations. Otherwise only the foreign key values will be imported.

The next three steps are optional. If your database contains images, they will be imported, associated and organized as a fileset in your filemanager automatically.

Since most databases contain no image files we offer a tool to associate database entries to prepared images on the fly while importing. It is not required to use this feature but very handy to avoid manual editing of many entries after importing.

• First create a fileset with all images that should be associated to the database table entries you are about to import.
• The filenames must contain values of one of the database columns of the table you want to import.
  This sounds complicated but isn`t. Most database tables have ids, serial numbers, product codes or similar columns. We just use these unique numbers or codes as identifier for our images. In the screenshot we use the 'id' column which contains numbers from 1-99.
• Before uploading your fileset, just make sure to name all files with existing unique values from a suitable column in your table.
• The filenames can have any prefix as long as it is the same for all files and the unique part is at the end.
  In the screenshot we use 'spaceship1' up to 'spaceship99'.

• The fileset containing all product images is named 'products' so 'products' is selected as source.
• The table column 'product_id' contains ids in the pattern 'pr0000' so the filename column is 'product_id'.
• Filenames look like 'my_product_file_pr0000' so the filename prefix is 'my_product_file_'.

Most products need to carry more than one image each.

• In this case you can create many filesets named in a pattern like the filenames for single image associations.
• So the filesets could be named like 'my_product_fileset_pr0000'. Filenames don't matter in this case and you can add images anytime later.
• The fileset prefix is 'my_product_fileset_'.
• The table column is the same as in the example above 'product_id'

After the import process is finished you`ll see a link to the newly created express object. The database import also created all necessary page types and forms for your objects.

The import of your database tables created a express entity and pagetypes for each. Imported express entities mirror their database table´s structure like columns, column types and column order. The import functionality creates image and fileset attributes for each express entity per default if the table does not contain a column with files. This way images can be added to any express entity later.

The rows and values from each database table are imported as express entries for the newly created express entity. Not only any value itself can be edited, the global structure and display of each express entry value can be customized. This way you can define how units, labels and associated columns are displayed.