Possibly odd behaviour importing contacts in 4.5.0

[Upperholme]

Doing my first contact import using 4.5.0, and seeing some potentially odd behaviour.

I have only 28 contact records already in the database, and 223 contacts in my import data (of which about 30 or so have an organisation name as well. I've set the Duplicate contact matching to "no duplicate checking" as I'm not sure of the status of the data in the import, and as the total number records is small I'm aiming to import everything and then go through a manual dedupe/merge process.

I've gone through my import file and got everything cleaned up as far as I can see, and the import wizard seems happy with the data (not showing any pre-import alerts). Once I import however I'm getting a notice to tell me that a large percentage of my records have "mismatched contact IDs". Not sure what this might mean as the import data has no contact id data in it. It tells me this data is not being imported, but upon inspection I can see that it is being imported and new records (262 of them to be precise) are being created.

When I download and inspect the so-called "mismatched contact ID" records it tells me that for all of the records "Related contact required fields are missing."

The only related contacts that are being created are the organisation records for those contacts that have any data in the organisation field of the data import file.

Should I assume from this that if I want to create the organisation records cleanly (i.e without spurious and incorrect warning/error messages) then every record in the import file must have organisation name data? Seems a little inflexible. Comparing the data that has been identified as mismatched I can't see any obvious pattern with respect to the fields that pertain to related data.

Anyone seen anything similar and understood what is going on here?

[JonGold]

Hi Graham,

I've definitely seen this problem before, going back a long time.

I no longer use the GUI import in part because of issues like this - but I recall that in this situation, I did an import without the related organization name, then did a second import of JUST the related organization name.  I believe there was even a time where doing a related organization name import would create a blank organization if you had any contacts that didn't have the organization name defined.  That, at least, was easier to solve - you just imported, then deleted the blank organization.

These days I'm a little bit more confident in my coding skills, and I might try and address the root cause here - but I think it's a tragedy of the importing ecosystem that most folks who have the ability to fix importing bugs don't use the importing GUI.