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Hi,

I'm a CiviCRM newbie, hope this question is not too idiotic  :=)

I'm importing contacts from a CSV file. First 2 lines:

First Name,Last Name,Address,Suburb,Phone,email,Issues,Result of email
Lynne,Charlesworth,144 Hereford St,Forest Lodge,9660 0872,l.charlesworth@bigpond.com,Harold Park,

Only about half the contacts (47 out of 72) import and these appear to be already existing ones in the DB. I can recognise them cos I'm adding a unique tag in the import. (I should add some other marker I guess, to check what's really happening, eg. change the street address and confirm it gets Updated, I'll do that).

I've checked the CSV file for all the usual issues - CR/LF endings, weird chars. I've tried all options of Update, Fill, No Duplicate Checking. And some variants of field assignment.

But it's determined to never import any contact which is new, and not already in the DB. I've checked this with other dummy data in same format as above, ie. Johnny,Tester,123 Somewhere St,Anywhere,12345678,xyz@abc.com. These just won't import. No errors reported at any time in all this.

Date Format is not relevant, there are no dates. I'm not importing the first header line. The Total Rows and Valid Rows show as 47 on the 3rd (Preview) screen, it's as though it's just not seeing the other lines, or discarding them silently before the Preview.

Hopefully this is blindingly obvious and I just have missed a key concept. Apolgies if the above is too brief.

All help much appreciated.

Greg E

Thanks Dave.

After a large amount of experimentation, I have find that the Import function must see exactly the right number of fields in each line of the CSV, otherwise it silently discards the line, whether there are too few or too many fields w.r.t. the defined import mapping. So trailing empty fields must be present as a ,,, sequence.

Am I right here ? Excel doesn't always save CSV's like this, and it's a very tight restriction. The convention I'm used to is that trailing fields don't need the comma sequence. I would say at the very least the Import should report the lines discarded as some type of error or warning, otherwise they look like dupes were discarded, or you don't even notice what happened.

Cheers,
Greg E

Ok. Well I can have a go at progressing this. I take it you're not on the current dev team then ? I don't know the faces around here yet. So I need to submit a bug or RFE via some channel ? I'm not a PHP coder at present.

BTW I forgot to say that it happens on our 3.4.1 and the (3.4.6 ?) Demo site you pointed me to.

It's tempting to say "how could that be still there X years down the track" but everyone thinks their "bug" is astonishing and "thousands" musy have already stumbled on it before  :=)

Thanks for the help.
Greg E

Hi Petednz,

Yes I could have attached the data earlier I guess. Hanging back for confidentiality. Attached is .xls and the .csv it saves to. You can see about 2/3 of the way down the CSV file there are lines without a trailing comma. I guess it's the difference between an explicitly empty/blank field, and no field at all.

I agree with you it should show up much more. And yes putting a dummy column of data on the end would fix it.

BTW, I'm using Office 2004 for Mac, on Mac OS X 10.6.8, so I'm probably in some small minority, it could be the old Mac Office version. Why don't I check this on my Windows 7 with a later Office ??  Stand by ..

Ok, Windows 7 and Office 2007 save all trailing commas as expected, on this data anyway. So problem solved. PEBKAC, PICNIC, whatever you like. Unusual for Mac to be the problem, buuuuut, Microsoft don't put a pile of effort into Mac Office I guess.

Thanks !  Greg E

PS Didn;t attach data in the end, no need.