Dear community,
How do you import data without creating any records? The main goal is to only update records.
Example:
We import a list of contacts with upated emails but it's possible that someone has changed their names. These people shouldn't be created in creatio but rather ignored. (matching column is name)
Is this possible and what's the best practice?
Kind regards,
Yosef
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Hello Yosef,
Your request can be done properly in case you have 1 stable and unique column for records in the excel file and in a system as well.
Let’s imagine the following situation:
You have an excel file that contains “Full name”, “Email” and (some kind of unique identifier) “Birth name/Birth time” column and other columns which we may disregard. And we save the conditions described in your message: you need to update the email address and you know that some Contact names are different from the one you have in a system (ex. Alex instead of Alexander). In order to perform the import, follow the steps below:
1. Data import – Select the needed file – Where do you want the date imported to? – Contact – Next
2. Specify column mapping between Excel file and the system: Full name – Full name; Email – Email; Birth time - Birth time. And un-press other columns in case no update is requested for them.
3. Specify the duplicates search rule for data import to the system.
Important! Here you should choose only your column with unique identifier (“Birth time”), so no duplicates will be created and the existing records will be updated with information from the file. And one more thing to mention, the “Full name” column will be updated along with the “Email” column as well, but as it’s same contact and based on your comments I can assume that it’s not an issue if the changes in name are minor and relevant (Alex instead of Alexander).
You can consider this as an example, it can be applied to a very specific case as yours, described in detail, but I do understand that it’s a bit hard to apply to a very a general occasion.
As of now there is no mechanism to make the system blind to the records with minor changes or implement a set of rules for AI to choose which records to ignore.
Hope, this helps.
Best regards,
Anastasiia
Anastasiia Zhuravel,
Hi Anastasiia,
Thank you for your reply but in this case people with the same birth time(?) will be considered as the same person I think.
And this doesn't cover contacts that never existed in the system before.
So another example would be:
- Creatio has 3 000 contacts
- Import file has 20 000 contacts
goal = Update 3 000 contacts without creating 17 000 other contacts
The only solution I can think of would be to export all contacts, make a match in excel and then import only the ones that matched.
Kind regards,
Yosef
Dear Yosef,
That’s why I have emphasized that the column chosen for “Duplicate search” should be stable and unique identifier for the records and yes, that’s the point of a Duplicate search - the records with same value in the column will be considered as the same record so it’ll prevent system from creating duplicates and the information in other columns will be simply updated.
Based on your second example I would agree that the most appropriate way is first to “cut off” the irrelevant 17000 contacts and after that import only the needed records to the system to update the information.
Best regards,
Anastasiia
Anastasiia Zhuravel,
Hi,
I try importing data to Creatio, I checked the ID for the duplicate but I get an error - Row 117: Violation of PRIMARY KEY constraint 'PKM6wloFxzp2AiW27IF5551t48'. Cannot insert duplicate key in object 'dbo.Product'.
why is this not modifying the record?
Thanks, Chani