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  • Doubling of Contacts When Importing with Relationships
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Author Topic: Doubling of Contacts When Importing with Relationships  (Read 939 times)

mman

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Doubling of Contacts When Importing with Relationships
May 21, 2010, 01:24:37 pm
I am currently importing congressional contacts from one spreadsheet. The Member of Congress has been added successfully. However, when i try to import the Scheduler or Staffer information with the relationship type, it creates a brand new Member of Congress contact, but with no information. The relationship links this new "empty" contact with the staffer, and the correct Member of Congress contact is left alone.

I followed the instructions on this page:
http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,12533.0.html

Which led me to this page:
http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/Importing+Student%2C+Staff+and+Parents

And i am still not able to figure it out. Please help!

Donald Lobo

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Re: Doubling of Contacts When Importing with Relationships
May 21, 2010, 04:22:55 pm

1. Please consider upgrading to 3.1.5 since that is the supported version

2. You might want to follow a copy of the school import stuff carefully and try to replicate it and see if u can get it work before u try importing your files

If you cannot figure it out, consider hiring someone from http://civicrm.org/professional/

lobo
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Re: Doubling of Contacts When Importing with Relationships
May 21, 2010, 11:56:34 pm
It probably means you're trying to match the congressman on a wrong value. Eg. If you match on the sort_name ("Doe, John"), but you have "mr John Doe" in your spreadsheet, won't match.

This being said, you're probably matching on a missing field or something weird. As lobo said, upload to 3.1.5, seem to recall some issues with the import indeed.

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Re: Doubling of Contacts When Importing with Relationships
May 23, 2010, 03:04:15 pm
I had this error recently.  The imported contacts should, if possible, be matched to an External Identifier or Internal Identifier number, rather than a name.  This makes your life much easier when importing.  If CiviCRM cannot match an imported contact to an existing contact when creating this relationship, it will create a new contact instead. 

Interal IDs are created by CiviCRM within CiviCRM.  External IDs are created by you, with whatever method you wish, and CiviCRM can work with External IDs during the import process.  Make sure the ID numbers always unique per contact.

Regardless of how you experiment, remember to use Groups when you import so you can track your imports, I would say you should import test batches of 5 or 10 names first.  Once you know the import is working, import less than 1000 rows per attempt.
« Last Edit: May 23, 2010, 03:06:10 pm by Stoob »
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mman

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Re: Doubling of Contacts When Importing with Relationships
June 04, 2010, 11:48:28 am
Thanks for the advice! I just upgraded to 3.1.5, and tried going through the instructions again. I created an External ID (so S1, S2, S3, etc) for each congressional office, and went through the student/teacher/adviser tutorial by replacing each of the column headings with the equivalent in the tutorial. The information was organized the same way (the office, staffer, and scheduler all in one spread sheet, each office taking up one row). After importing the Member information perfectly, the second round of imports (for staffers) would not import and it said the ID was already used. I feel like i'm missing a crucial step somewhere and/or my understanding of CiviCRM is way off.

So in response to Stoob's post; if External IDs are supposed to be unique for every single contact i have, how would it be helpful in importing relationships, unless the relationship was specified somewhere before? I'm not understanding why each contact should have an ID when the rules could be set to strict and i could just match the office address, for example? Basically, have it so the three people who have the same address are related.

Thanks again for everyone's help.
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  • Doubling of Contacts When Importing with Relationships

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