CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I've been trying to import historical data on postal mailing activities and I keep getting import errors with "Invalid Activity Name" as the reason.

For example, I have a csv file with 396 records for the special event invitations we sent out in Feb 2011. Each record contains the external ID (used as the contact ID in the original FileMaker database), Contact First Name, Contact Last Name, Activity Type Label (i.e. Direct Mail: Special Event invitation), Activity Date, Subject and Campaign ID.

I tried adding a New Activity in CiviCRM and then added an Activity ID column, but am not able to map it (or any other column) to Activity Name when importing. I continue to receive the "Invalid Activity Name" error and failure to import any of the data.

I need to import the historical mailing data in order to pull some mailing lists for our upcoming events that include CiviCRM contacts, and I cannot figure out where the Activity Name comes from or how to add it to the file in order to get my data to import correctly.

Please help!!

I'm having the same problem with a client.  I can't seem to get the right activity name or activity ID. we are importing to a custom activity type.

mirrorstage: in my testing i discovered that I cannot do an import by the activity type ID, but i can do an import by the activity type label, provided that it has no special characters (in my case the problem was a hyphen "-")

UPDATE: i've filed an issue here http://issues.civicrm.org/jira/browse/CRM-9303

The problem may be that when you first created your activity type you entered something like "My New Activity" in the activity label field.  This value gets stored in the database in a field called "activity name" which you cannot see, nor change.  Then you may have changed your activity label to "New Activity", the label changed, but the name did not.  When you try to do the import with "New Activity" rather than "My New Activity" civicrm can't match it to an existing activity type.