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Summary
There are some imports that share a basic interface structure and behavior. Each import may have some minor variations on the common functionality as covered in their respective pages:
- Import agencies
- Import reps (spec)
- Import customers
- Import accounts
- Import staff users (spec)
- Import forms (spec)
- Import rep IDs (spec)
File & data format
Excel
All of these imports are Excel imports and follow the rules outlined in that page.
Columns
See the respective import pages (above) for the column specs.
- Best practice: I find the easiest way to do an import is to start with a pre-made blank file from this website.
New (create) vs. existing (update)
All of these imports can either create new information or update existing information. A single import can involve one or the other or both.
Unique identifier
Everything in RPM has something that uniquely identifies it. For example, there can't be 2 agencies with the same name. This unique identifier is used to determine if the row in Excel is referring to something that already exists in RPM (update) or not (create).
- Agency: "Agency"
- Rep: "Agency" + "First name" + "Last name"
- Rep ID: "Rep ID" + "Supplier"
- Customer: "Customer"
- Account: "Account" + "Supplier"
- Form import: "Number" (and if applicable, "New number")
- Staff: "First name" + "Last name"
Duplicates
If more than one row in the Excel file have the same unique identifier, a "duplicate" warning is generated and the rows are ignored if the import is finished.
Incomplete (required columns)
The column or columns that describe the unique identifier are always required, they must be filled in. If those columns, or any other required columns, are empty an "incomplete" warning is generated and the row is ignored if the import is finished.
- The one exception is the form "Number". If it is left blank RPM will create a new form and give it an automatically generated number.
The wizard
- File upload (browse)
- In progress: File analysis (wait)
- Summary (confirm)
- In progress: Import (wait)
- Finished (error report)
File upload
Select an Excel file to import.
File analysis
First the file is checked for validity. Any of the following critical errors will return the user to the upload page:
- "A valid Excel file is required"
- "Required columns are missing or incorrect" (the whole column)
- "Column limit of 75 exceeded"
- "The file contains only duplicate, invalid, or incomplete rows"
Then, the unique identifier(s) of each row are checked to determine the number new, existing, duplicate, and incomplete rows for the summary.
Summary
The number of new, existing, duplicate, and incomplete rows.
- Each is only shown if > 0
- For existing the word "may" update is used because it may turn out there's nothing different in the file so nothing gets changed.
- The duplicate count is the actual number of rows, not the number of sets. Example: If rows 3 and 8 are duplicates then "2 duplicates" is shown.
- Each count is a link to a page that lists all the row numbers sorted by new, existing, duplicate, and incomplete.
- The summary also has the overwrite option (see below) and some specific [[Import forms|form import] options.
Import
The importer processes each new or existing row (duplicate and incomplete rows are ignored) and adds or updates the data in RPM. This can take several minutes.
- A form import can take particularly long if there a lot or rows and/or a lot of fields. For example, we did one import of 7000 rows with about 60 columns and it took nearly an hour. That same import with half the rows and 3 columns took a few minutes.
- Once an import has started, it can't be stopped. It will continue even if you leave the page.
Finished
The final page of the wizard also has separate text areas containing lists of any parent errors, cell errors by row, and cell errors by column.
- The "parent" and "by row" boxes list row numbers separated by comma + space.
- The "by column" box lists column header names separated by comma + space.
Overwrite option
If there are existing objects being updated we'll give the user the option to overwrite existing data.
- Option: "Leave existing data intact"
- Only import data into empty fields. If this option is not selected (a.k.a. overwrite), we still don't replace something with nothing. In other words, empty cells in the Excel file are always ignored, regardless of the value of this option.
- Default is checked.
- This page was last modified 16:35, 12 Oct 2007.
- This page has been accessed 1669 times.