[B]Importing Still Pathetic[/B]

[tjadams]

Just needed to rant again about Import issues with Sugar. Even with the release of 4.5...

1) I have to manually check for account duplicates on import
2) Importing a list of multiple contacts, some in the same company, will result in a new account for each instance in the import file.
3) I cannot import both contact and account information at the same time, and when I try to do this separate (in 2 steps), it will create duplicate accounts.

Again, being able to import lists at will without fear of multiple accounts and the ability to map both account and contact fields in one step is a basic feature of EVERY commercial CRM I know of....

If the Developmers need an idea of how to fix them sign up for a free trial of Salesforce.com and see how painless it is to import multiple contacts from same and different companies....

Still waiting.......

[george_bbch]

HI TJ

I've made a few imports in 4.2 and 4.5: first the accounts, then the contacts. For the latter I've used the field "Account Name" in the import mapping table to match the previously loaded account. The two import files have been checked and cleaned for a perfect match of the account names by using an account code and I've noticed no duplicate accounts after the import.

I prefer to do duplicate checks with an external specialized tool, that uses soundex or fuzzy string searching algorithms - they give better results than a plain 1:1 check. However, I've noticed that Sugar 4.5's import tool has such a 1:1 duplicate check feature; I've briefly tested it and works OK.

George

[ericrwhite]

I realize this thread is a bit dated... however I've just run into the salesforce.com Account important problem too. I'm a new user, so Installed 4.5.0h fresh (both an installation and using the vmware appliance version). I can import Contacts just fine, but Account importation fails.

After poking around in logs, I find the following message in my sugarcrm.log:

FATAL SugarCRM - MySQL error 1048: Column 'id' cannot be null

... and I can verify that my CSV file Id column is fully populated for each row in the file.

I believe it's like that the 4.2.0 SugarCRM version was working, and the data carried over to 4.5.0. However, I believe there is a bug in the salesforce.com Account import function in 4.5.0h.

The MySQL table schema shows the Id field for the accounts table as a VARCHAR(36) and the data coming out of salesforce.com is a 16-character alphanum, double-quoted.

Since the contact import works flawlessly, I have to conclude that this is a highly annoying bug (when you've got 1200 Accounts coming out of salesforce.com)

[mycrmspacegunnar]

Hi,

as you correclty spotted there is some room for improvement when using the Sugar import.
You can use the Sugar import to correctly import related records as Accounts and Concatcs
but you will need to do this in the correct order and you will need to hint/make sure that the good unique key is used.

Is cheesy way of doing a better import then the normal Sugar provides is to add a good unique key to prevent doubles.
Sugar allows you to use the ID as unique identifier.
So if you are lucky and you have already already the database with unique ides then reuse them!
Just using the Account name as key is ussually not a good solution as many people have customer havin more than one office and if the name does not distinguishe the offices perfectly then you will easely run into problems here.

Often you can get a much better import result by creating an extra column which contains some concatenated fields form the main record to have a unique key. zip code + street address might give you a good unique key.
If you now create your CSV data with this extra column and use this as key for the import then the import can automaticly correct any double during import. First you need to import the accounts then the contacts.

If you have a bit more complex data to import with more relations than the Sugar import can automaticly
handle then it might be worth to consult someone who does such data imports professionally.

Cheers
Gunnar

[ericrwhite]

Thanks, but, this data came directly out of salesforce.com. All IDs are unique and the issue is I tried to import the Accounts first -- jnowing I wanted to hook them up first.... in fact, I would have rather imported my Users first, so I could hook the accounts to users, but there is no way to import Users into SugarCRM, that I can find.... that might be OK, if I could enter Users by hand, then find out the IDs in the User table and modify the Account data... but I can't do that either.

Since the error message is about null IDs in the Account table -- not unique IDs -- and the IDs are all unique (having come directly from salesforce.com) then there is clearly a bug, not an inconvenience.

As a test, I signed up for the free personal salesforce.com service, then successfully imported my Accounts.csv and my Contacts.csv ....

There's a bug in the SugarCRM Account importing facility that should be fixed.

[imn0tnorml]

<- 1st post ->
My company has started using sugarCRM and we have run into this issue.

What we are trying to do is basically, "update" a custom field (balance due) using an export from quickbooks using the "Required" Name field as the UID.

The files import, but for each record, there is a duplicate.

If there was a way to "Import Updates" this would solve our problem.

Hopefully someone can come up with a resolution before I'm asked to build it. I have enough work to do.

[mycrmspacegunnar]

<- 1st post ->

What we are trying to do is basically, "update" a custom field (balance due) using an export from quickbooks using the "Required" Name field as the UID.

Yes you are right.
Sugars import mechanis is designed for importing NEW records.

Its NOT designed for exporting records to e.g excel
updating some columns and then using an update-import mechanism to update these record in sugar again
many people wanted to use Sugar for this and are missing this feature. :-/

Hacking a quick PHP tool yourself to do such an update job is actually simple and I assume most of us have done this several times. But writing a user friendly and fool prove update tool with nice gui will be some real work.
It might be more clever to have this integrated into Sugar than reinventing the wheel.


Cheers
Gunnar

[imn0tnorml]

Ok, I wrote the script to update records in the custom fields table accounts_cstm.

I run my script and do not recieve any errors. I am using php and using echo mysql_error(); after each query.

Do I need to do anything else special to get this to apply?

** Problem fixed, I had to obtain the primary key for the record I was going to update before performing the update.

[mopes]

I'm running Version 4.5.0d (Build 1168) and importing .csv contacts - - - and this is not working - its duplicating the first record's account name 1700 times for all contacts. Importing accounts first then contacts has the same effect.

I don't understand - what good is a CRM application if you can't use it to import data? Its like finding a free car on the side of the road without a door handle to open the door. Is there a bridge format that I should employ?

[gregmayer]

This is quite interesting; I see that a user was having trouble and there's no reply. I know that you have to be careful in importing and watch field matching;;;; so is anyone going to reply to this users frustration? Greg (love SugarCRM)