As far as I've been able to determine with my testing, importing City information into a record will simply take the first record in the database by that name, regardless of whether it matches Country and State/Province information also present in the record, and if none are found, will create a City record with blank Country and State/Province fields.
Before I go and duplicate the lengthy business process I wrote to handle these imports more elegantly for every object one might import address information into, I just wanted to confirm:
Is this the expected behaviour, and is there no way in the system to have imports take country and region into account when matching cities, or am I missing something?
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Dear Darian,
Can you please specify what mapping are you using for such import?
Angela Reyes,
I'm mapping directly to City, State/province, and Country. As I said, the imports do function, but the City field doesn't appear to take into account the contents of the other two when matching, which can lead to some rather nonsensical records. I just wanted to confirm whether or not there's a workaround to that aside from a separate business process for each object type.
Darian Lewis,
If importing directly to "City" object - records will be created successfully if they meet duplicates search while import rules conditions. Correspondent records will be created in state/province and country lookups (but my tests showed that "Country" field value doesn't populate in "State/province" lookup when importing data into "Cities" lookup). Generally you should see new records and new records will be created in related objects. The only data that is not filled in as I said is "Country" field value in "State/province" lookup. I will report this problem to our R&D team so they could modify import process logic so it could also import this field value when importing to cities.