Creating Menus using excel sheet

Question

How we can create Joomla menus using excel sheet of 2k rows?. I created the script but it gets time out after certain number of insertion i.e. 50 or 100 sometime.

    foreach($finalData as $key=>$val)
{
    echo $key."<br/>";
    $params     =   [
        "service_description"   =>  $val[7],
        "contact_number"        =>  $val[8],
        "contact_email"         =>  $val[9],
        "keywords"              =>  $val[10],
        "price"                 =>  $val[11],
        "banner"                =>  $defaultBanner,
        "menu-anchor_title"     =>  "",
        "menu-anchor_css"       =>  "",
        "menu_image"            =>  "",
        "menu_image_css"        =>  "",
        "menu_text"             =>  1,
        "menu_show"             =>  1,
        "page_title"            =>  "",
        "show_page_heading"     =>  "",
        "page_heading"          =>  "",
        "pageclass_sfx"         =>  "",
        "menu-meta_description" =>  $val[7],
        "menu-meta_keywords"    =>  $val[10],
        "robots"                =>  "",
        "secure"                =>  0
    ];


    $custom_data    =   [
        "parent_id"             =>  $jinput->get("parent_id"),
        "level"                 =>  2,
        "menutype"              =>  "mainmenu",
        "title"                 =>  "Sameday and On Board Couriers in ".$val[2],
        "type"                  =>  "component",
        "link"                  =>  "index.php?option=com_couriercsv&view=courier",
        "published"             =>  1,
        "browserNav"            =>  0,
        "access"                =>  1,
        "template_style_id"     =>  0,
        "params"                =>  json_encode($params),
        "home"                  =>  0,
        "language"              =>  "*",
        "client_id"             =>  0,
        "component_id"          =>  $component->extension_id
    ];

    $menu   =   JTable::getInstance('Menu','MenusTable');

    // menu if present 
    $menu->load(0);

    $menu->setLocation($custom_data['parent_id'], 'last-child');

    $menu->bind($custom_data);
    $menu->store();

    if($menu->id)
    {
        $menu->rebuildPath($menu->id);
        // store the menu id
    }

}

Answer 1

Apparently your script runs out of max_execution_time - You could temporary increase this to allow your script to complete, since this seems to be 1-shot action. Check also set_time_limit.

Another option would be to write a cli script and run it from the command line, where there is no max_execution_time restriction.

However if you are building an extension that will need to handle such imports on all kind of environments, then you should take a different approach - so that your script will have to make the imports in various steps that will take shorter time than the max_execution_time of each server and not in 1 go.