Question about the Import function

[sbantz]

We recently imported 1500 "Accounts" from our old contact management software. Of course, later on the sales people said they were missing the website for the accounts. I was able to do another export from the old system and I now have a csv file that has the account name and the website address. The account name exactly matches what is in SugarCRM already.

Can I use the import function to import just the website field? I have been scared to try it because I don't want to end up with 1500 more accounts with just the website field filled in. I am looking for specific instructions on how to import this website field to existing records.

Thanks. I hope that makes sense.

[SamuelAugy]

I think you can import all the fields and use the merge function.

[sbantz]

I thought about doing that, but it seems like a ton of work merging 1500 accounts two at a time.

I ended up using MS Access and the ODBC driver to create an update query. Of course, I tested it on a test database first to make sure it would work. Basically, I linked the accounts table from Sugar to an imported table that had the account name and the website URL. I joined the two tables in an update query (joining accounts.name to websites export.Company from my custom table) and had it populate the [accounts].[website] when the account names matched. Worked like a champ.

The query looked something like this:
UPDATE accounts INNER JOIN [Websites export] ON accounts.name = [Websites export].Company SET accounts.website = [websites export].[web page]
WHERE (((accounts.name)=[websites export].[Company]));

[ZaleTabakman]

I am not a programmer - just a simple sales person wanting to use SugarCRM.

This is a big problem - I use Plaxo and LinkedIn to maintain a large list of leads.

Everytime I want to update - say a change in e-mail - this will be 4,500 records updated.

Is there a way of making some of this code into a plugin that is run to merge?

Say some user selected field (such as e-mails) match then Merge records and no other fields are in conflictt - then merge
otherwise show user a number of choices
1) Force Merge - lastest record over earlier record
2) Choose case by case

Zale

[berthelemy]

What seems to happen is that SugarCRM is setup to only allow a one-off import. There's no way of updating existing data. If you're trying to keep two systems synchronized (eg. accounts and CRM) then this leads to a nightmare scenario of having to update them independently.

This is something I'd love to see sorted.

I'll put in a feature request.

Mark