Importing records with ID's containing special characters

[mcichelli]

I am running 5.0.0e on Windows.

I am importing Accounts and Contacts that I have pulled out of a Goldmine data base.

I decided to initially use the Goldmine ID's for the SugarCRM ID's. Accounts seemed to work fine.

The Contacts (Additional Contacts for those Goldmine gurus out there) have ID's that contain many assorted special characters. Some of these seem to have been altered during the import process. For example, and imbedded & turned into a 4. I have not, nor do I want to, compare all 23,000 keys in my records.

Is there a list somewhere of characters that are NOT acceptable in a Contact ID? If not, I will have to rethink how I am doing this. I can, of course, simply generate sequential keys of my own, but I was hoping to be able to keep the original id's to help in matching history records to them.

[Angel]

You might want to consider putting the accountno/recid (whichever it is you are using from GM) into a custom field instead of the ID column.

Sugar is expecting letters, numbers and hyphens only within the ID column. It is possible it might be doing something to other characters if it finds them, don't know for sure as I never use my own custom ID values. Were you to put the value into a different field, I would assume it would treat it as a literal value and hopefully eliminate the issue.