CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

We use monthly updates from our statewide voter database to update civiCRM.  Before import, we create a file that contains only changed fields for records that have changed.  Fields that are not changed from one statewide udpate to the next are left null.  When we import contacts, we select "update" under import options > "for duplicate contacts" and the import then does not overwrite current civiCRM data with null fields.  For us, this is valuable because we will frequently get address/phone updates long before the state picks them up in their database.

This issue was touched on a while ago here:

http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,1558.0.html

and a still open issue has been filed here:

http://issues.civicrm.org/jira/browse/CRM-2980

I would very much like to be able to retain this option, but there are situations where it would be useful to overwrite old data with null fields.  Perhaps in a future release, the import options > "for duplicate options" could be expanded to include:

Skip
Update When Fields Are Non-Null
Update All Fields
Fill
No duplicate Checking

Thanks,
Morgan

Nope, there is no progress on this feature.

Kurund