CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Can anyone confirm that I'm correctly understanding the limitations on importing and exporting Relationship-related information?

From what I can tell, it's possible to specify during an import the fact that contact A has a certain relationship with an existing contact B, but it's not possible to import data into any of the core fields associated with the actual relationship (such as Description or Start Date) or to import data into custom fields associated with a relationship. Likewise, when exporting contact A I can also choose to export fields associated with a related contact B, but I cannot export any core or custom fields associated with their relationship.

Is this true, or am I missing something?

If so:

a) Is there a reason this functionality doesn't exist (something very technically difficult about it?) or is it simply something that hasn't been seen as important? Has there been any recent discussion of adding more robust importing and exporting of relationships? (I looked a bit but didn't find anything.)

b) Any advice on workarounds? Could I use a custom search or a custom report as a workaround for the export part at least?

c) Should I start a topic in the Documentation board to suggest adding notes about this to the User Guide? I didn't see it mentioned and I wish I'd known sooner (it's thrown a bit of a wrench into my plans for configuring Civi for our needs).

Let me know if more specific information about my use case would be helpful?

Thanks!