CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I failed to properly estimate the amount of time it has taken to migrate data into CiviCRM; deduping, de-normalising.

I have almost completed all the required data migration using the various import wizards and, luck for me, left the 'more complex' data till this point.

I have created a few custom data fields in CiviCRM to store 'Notes' and 'History' fields previously stored in Excel. Due to the lack of advanced filtering and query functionality, I migrated all data into Access and performed 'mapping' of the legacy data fields to CiviCRM fields.
These two 'Notes' and 'History' fields have a Microsoft Access datatype of Memo and the length of the contents range from 120 to over 900. In CiviCRM, I created the custom data fields and set the length to 2000 (just in case) and, receiving no warnings about maximum length, I assumed this was okay.

Within the memo fields, after replacing some 'unusual characters', I replaced CRLF (13)(10) with LF assuming that CRLF would not be supported in CiviCRM/MySQL. I attempted the import, and although some data was imported it was truncated and some other fields were missing.

I attempted the import again, replacing the CRLF with \n and \r\n respectively. Both these imports do not get to step 2.

Can someone advise me of:

• What is the maximum length supported by the custom field 'alphanumeric' datatype in CiviCRM?
• How can I import a 'newline' character into a Custom field?

Thanks in advance.

Hi,

If you got complex stuff you want to import, I found myself developing custom scripts of a few lines that use the api instead of massaging my csv files more efficient.

X+