Author Topic: Import Contacts problem - stops at step 3 (Read 5044 times)

phel0049 · October 09, 2007, 01:17:11 am

Hi there,
I'm sorry I'm new to this, so forgive me if I mis-speak.

I'm running a website on Powweb, with Joomla 1.0.13, php5 (just upgraded), and freshly installed CiviCRM 1.8.11536 (for Joomla with php5).

I'm trying to import contacts for the first time from a csv list - very simple - about 300 records, with about 15 fields. At first when I was importing the Import Wizard rejected everything as Error records. I fixed a batch of those in csv and tried to re-import. This time there were no error messages, I get to Import Step 3 (preview) where everything looks good - all rows are valid - and I click on "Import Now" and then select yes in the popup (are you sure you want to import now?"). Then the screen refreshes, still in Step 3, and at the top it says "Preview (step 3 of 4)" and "Importing records... 0% No processing status reported yet."

Then, with no error message, the page refreshes back to the Joomla login! I've done this 5 times now. Any suggestions?

Thanks
-Marilyn

geilhufe · October 09, 2007, 10:17:51 am

Not sure about your specific situation, but some starting points:
http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/Import+Errors
http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/Import+Is+Slow

This is from the FAQ section of the documentation:
http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/FAQ

Donald Lobo · October 09, 2007, 01:29:13 pm

Please check your apache error logs and see if there are any messages there. If you dont have access to your error logs, please ask your hosting provider for them

lobo

phel0049 · October 09, 2007, 08:53:01 pm

Ok - I'm going to cry. I just wrote this really long message to both of you, it took me like an hour. Hit "Post" and the forum says "Error: Message is too large" or something. So I went back, and there is nothing but a blank box.

I need to regroup.

phel0049 · October 09, 2007, 09:03:32 pm

Ok - I'm going to start compsing another message in NotePad and then paste below.

Thank you, Gentlemen, for your advice. Here's what I tried and the results of that.

to: geilhufe
Thank you for those links. I looked at each one:
- For the First Link - "Common Import Errors" - I had some of those errors early on, but they were all fixed before this problem.
- For the Second Link - "Why Does Import Run So Slowly?" - I looked for my "CiviCRM configuration file (modules/config.inc.php)" by looking in by Home directory/Administrator, and in the Modules folder as well. I did a search in JoomlaXplorer for a file named "config.inc.php" on my whole site and found nothing, so I don't know how to change this file, unfortunately. Also, I don't recall ever enabling the GeoCode feature for any reason, so I think it's less likely that that is the issue (but I would like to cover my bases and change the setting, if I knew where it was).
- For the Third Link - I looked under Import/Export FAQs and I think I'm doing everything they suggest.

Now a separate message to Lobo (don't want this getting too large again!)

phel0049 · October 09, 2007, 09:23:00 pm

Ok, to Lobo::
I went to Powweb (my webhost), OPS > Services> Site Tools> CGI Error Logs (I assume that's an Apache Error Log?). I had really never been there before, so it was amazingly long. I copied everything to a text file* and then rest the file so it was blank. Then I tried to do import again.

I did get a stall again, but when I go to the CGI error log page and hit refresh, there is no error or anything listed there.

The error was a little different this time, however. Instead of booting me to the Login Page, at step 3 it just stayed there and this time there was an error message of a sort. At step 3 (Preview) the page says "importing records" underneath that there is a bar at 0%, and beneath that (this is new) there is the word "undefined" and immediately beneath that it says "We encountered an unknown error: [object Object]". And then it never moved again.

Any advice is appreciated!
Thanks,
marilyn

*The attached cgi file is "before reset bottom quarter." The whole thing is 732KB so I can't attach all of that here. Also, the file looks unhelpful to me because there aren't any dates or times of errors, so I don't know what is error from me or from before me.

phel0049 · October 09, 2007, 09:24:32 pm

I forgot, addendum to Lobo msg:

Side Note: Another wierd thing about this error. When I CTRL-L the word "undefined" (in the error msg described above), it pasted a ton of text, not just the word "undefined". In case you are interested in that oddity, I'm attaching it here as "hidden paste.txt" [sorry I don't know how to do the scrolling box of text thing I see in some other posts on this forum)

phel0049 · October 09, 2007, 09:35:31 pm

Oh, I also wanted to say, I did do a search in the forums on this new error message I received (before it was just a bounce-over to the login), and found a previous post you made to someone having import difficulties. I tried that advice, too, and here are the results.

1. Make sure that geocoding and other network services (USPS address cleanup) are disabled when importing. This is even more time consuming (network latency) and will slow down things significantly
-see my answer to geilhufe for link # 2 above - I can't locate the file to change it. But, I never enabled any GeoCode that I recall in any case.

2. Increase PHP memory and execution limit to some high numbers. We've fixed import to not leak a lot of memory, so 64M should be enough, but php execution limit should be raised to 60 minutes or more depending on the size of the file
-I had increased some of these values before, pre-import. In my PHP file (on Powweb) I had already set "max_input_time" to 200 and "memory_limit" to 100. I had increased "max_execution_time" to 500, but per your suggestion now raised it to 3600. To be honest, though, my .csv data file is only 27KB, so I don't think it should be so taxing.** I'm attaching my php.ini file here in case there's some setting I'm missing.

3. Cleanup your data before import. I think it is better/faster to write a script to do data cleanup on the csv file rather than expect CiviCRM to be all powerful and all encompassing. In the 2.x release we will be pushing for a simpler faster import and potentially obsoleting a few features rather than adding any new ones. Keeping things simple allows us to optimize code much better
I think I cleaned it all up along the way, because I was getting data error messages and now there are none.

Ok, once again, any and all advice is much appreciated.
Thank you kindly!!

Donald Lobo · October 10, 2007, 10:47:50 am

1. You should first try to import just a small subset of your file (5-10 records) and get that to work. Once that works you can try the larger file

2. If the small file does not work, you might want to try doing it on http://demo.civicrm.org/drupal/ and see if it works there. Please scramble any confidential data if you do this

lobo

phel0049 · October 10, 2007, 01:00:52 pm

Thanks for the reply Lobo...

Should I use that demo even though I have Joomla?

And how do I scramble the data?

Grazi
-Marilyn

Donald Lobo · October 10, 2007, 05:53:18 pm

99% of the code is the same between drupal and joomla, and this will give u an idea of how the import process works etc

Please do not load confidential data into the demo server (other folks also have access to this data). You will need to modify it by hand and change the names/address/other information etc

lobo

daryn · November 14, 2007, 09:00:18 pm

Quote from: phel0049 on October 09, 2007, 01:17:11 am

...the page refreshes back to the Joomla login! I've done this 5 times now. Any suggestions?

This is a joomla session authentication problem. There are two forum threads at joomla.org with two different fixes. Not sure but you may need both.

http://forum.joomla.org/index.php/topic,193707.msg919621.html#msg919621
and
http://forum.joomla.org/index.php/topic,193707.msg943504.html#msg943504

While this will stop you from getting kicked out of joomla, it will unfortunately not fix the contact import issue, but it looks like CiviCRM will have a fix soon...

Donald Lobo · November 14, 2007, 10:43:37 pm

This is fixed in the svn version of v1.9 and will be part of the next v1.9 release (sometime later this week or early next week?)

lobo

eugenevz · November 16, 2007, 02:11:18 am

HI

I'm having the exact same prob as Marilyn ABOVE and don't know how to fix.

Any suggestions? My import stops at STEP 3, and I only have about 100 rows and 5 columns of data.

Thanks
Eugene

Denver Dave · November 24, 2007, 07:02:10 pm

I'm having somewhat different issues when trying to import the exported sample data. I modify names and addresses and either get not a legitimate email address or record already exists.

Does someone have a small .csv file that can be imported assuming the sample data is loaded ? This would help determine if the issues are processing problems or data format problems.

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Author Topic: Import Contacts problem - stops at step 3 (Read 5044 times)

phel0049

Import Contacts problem - stops at step 3

geilhufe

Re: Import Contacts problem - stops at step 3

Donald Lobo

Re: Import Contacts problem - stops at step 3

phel0049

Re: Import Contacts problem - stops at step 3

phel0049

Re: Import Contacts problem - stops at step 3

phel0049

Re: Import Contacts problem - stops at step 3

phel0049

Re: Import Contacts problem - stops at step 3

phel0049

Re: Import Contacts problem - stops at step 3

Donald Lobo

Re: Import Contacts problem - stops at step 3

phel0049

Re: Import Contacts problem - stops at step 3

Donald Lobo

Re: Import Contacts problem - stops at step 3

daryn

Re: Import Contacts problem - stops at step 3

Donald Lobo

Re: Import Contacts problem - stops at step 3

eugenevz

Re: Import Contacts problem - stops at step 3

Denver Dave

Re: Import Contacts problem - stops at step 3