CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

im coming from quickbase. my company recently asked me to upgrade their website and i thought i could do away with quickbase altogether using civcrm and cck and integrate all into the site. without a 100% conversion, there is no cost savings, thus no need to find alternative solutions. i do hope i can make this work as it would save a few thousand a year in fees to intuit

i have installed the latest stable release into drupal 6.14 with minimal modules at this time including an admin addon, cck, nodereferrer, node import, drupal tweaks, and date. the cck and node stuff is for use with transferring our sales records and inventory. i could do the same for a static contact list, but a crm would be elegant solution and definitely contribute to a paperless environment. the ability for our site users to edit their own contact data would be a sweet bonus to keeping our contacts accurate.

i have several db's and the one im dealing with here is our contact list. we have 3100 entries with fields:
company || first name || last name || phone || fax || e-mail || website || address || notes

i exported this info to a csv and cleaned the data up a bit and for the purpose of mapping i renamed company to organization, ect..

however when the mapping step appears, it has no options to map 'first name' or 'last name' or 'fax' when using the organization type of import.

in reading the manual, i found in preparation for data import, that civcrm prefers split first and last names. fine, i split my columns in excel to prepare for that, but now im seeing the only place to map a name is to addressee? which does not support 2 fields....

in attempting to add custom fields i run into roadblocks that are perhaps, due to my lack of familiarity with the terminology used in civcrm. but im pretty good intuitively with stuff and im not afraid to rtfm, so im kinda stuck here.

i have not imported anything yet so im wondering what might happen if i import the data directly into a table in mysql, contructing the table and my custom fields in phpmyadmin. this is the process i followed to get nodeimport to read my sales records and mapping could not have been easier.

the address, blah, i cant even think about how im going to split that dirty data to make street address seperate from city and zip. if it was clean data, a formula to the rescue, but this is gunna be a datamare. we had it in all one field in quickbase so we could easily print labels from that field using custom views.

anyway, to the question.

how can i add custom fields that will appear during mapping, or, alternatively, will importing the data directly to the mysql database be a silver bullet and make civcrm fall into step with the fields?

thank you for the reply. i did set up a custom grouping which i called 'contact info' and made several fields. this was why i asked the question on how to map to those custom fields as they are not available to me during mapping. sorry for my lack of clarity.

however, the first portion of your reply i will definitely act on and try out as soon as i hit submit on this reply. it simply didnt occur to me to add the contact name as an employee of....and to have civicrm form 3 relationships based on that data is pretty nice. perhaps overkill for our needs, but nice

did you make contact info a "multiple records" custom group? I suspect so. We dont allow import for this type of group (as yet)

lobo

I know this is very much a gravedig out of nowhere, but I think this could be made a little more clear in the Import/Export documentation as I've just been searching for the last hour as to why my custom fields weren't showing up in my import procedure. I did just find that it says this on the information popup for the "Does this Custom Field Set allow multiple records?" field under the Custom Data set's settings page, so I really should have seen the warning there when I made my custom data set (*palmface*), but I have edited the Match Fields section of the wiki to display a note on this issue.