CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

OK, first, while this seems like a simple question, I've read through a LOT of documentation and searched the forum with little success so far, so I apologize if this has been answered before.

I have a flat file of students and their parents that I need to import to a fresh installation.  Each record contains student and parent name fields, contact info, etc., so students are in the same record as their parents (different name fields for each).  I'd like to create one household for each family (some families have more than one record b/c they have more than one student).  I'd also like to create individual records for each student and perhaps the parents as well. along with relevant relationships. 

Parents will eventually be solicited for support separately from the students, but could perhaps just be part of the household(?).  Finally, there's a history of donations and other related info that will need to be imported, but the unique ID will be a concatenation of name and address (or email) since the data came from Quickbooks without a unique ID connected to the donor name.

I have a unique ID for each student and one for each household, but haven't separated the parent records out with yet another unique ID...yet.  What is the basic approach for importing the contacts so that: 1) I can generate the proper relationships between indivs and households, and 2) preserve the ability to connect the donation info to the right people?  For the latter, I'm expecting I can create a lookup in a spreadsheet so as to replace the concatenated field with the unique Individual IDs. 

NOTE:  I've already created a separate table for Households (1 record each), and could do the same for the parents and assign a unique ID.

Hi chp,

I think you've outlined what you need to do fairly clearly.  Since you've already got children/parents in a flat file, I actually wouldn't create separate tables; I would create all your additional fields in that flat file.  So if your relevant columns are: Child Name, Parent1 Name, Parent2 Name*, I would add the following:
Child ID, Parent1 ID, Parent2 ID, Household Name, Household ID.  All the "ID" fields will become "External Identifiers" in CiviCRM.

*Of course you have other fields you're importing, but I expect you know how to handle those.

First, import households.  I imagine households only need a name and external ID, so import the flat file, but only import those two fields.
Second, do an import of the child info.
Third, parent1.  When importing, you can create the relationships by importing the household ID and Child ID columns.  Select "related info", "is in a household", and household ID, and also "related info", "is a parent of", and the Child ID.
Next, do the same with parent2.

Finally, you can do a lookup from your donations records (which SHOULD be in a separate table) to the relevant ID.  You can then import donations by external identifier lookup.

Note that creating relationships slows down an import considerably!

OK, thanks, JonGold.  I think that makes sense.  I'm working on a test run and will get back if problems. 

On a related note, the test file choked on the field Addressee.  It directs me to look at Admin->Option Lists->Addressee for valid values, but I don't have Option Lists as one of the choices under the Admin menu.  Also, the Addressee field I thought could be one of 3 or so formulas or custom.  If I'm importing text, I'd think that would be valid as custom data.  No?

Thanks again,
Carl

How do I find the version?  Someone else installed it and has, I think, recently updated to the latest release.  The note about checking Admin->Options was in the errors file.  So do I import just the text (e.g. Dear John) into the field?  For a household, that might be Dear John and Mary, but that's I think what cholked (there's no names in the household records).

OK thanks, it's 4.2.6.

I was just hopping on to update a little.  My test import worked reasonably well, with records essentially created properly.  But one more question.  Re: households, if I don't import any address info, then no address info gets moved to the HH record (even after members are added), so it would seem to be of little use, particularly for contact purposes.  Might be possible to household donor info, which is, of course, helpful. 

But what about householding for contact purposes (e.g. snail mail?).  If I want to do that do I have to import the address info to the HH record as well?  Isn't there a way that addresses are shared among related records?  I notice when I manually enter data that one address can be shared (though being "owned" by one of the contacts).  I thought that would be how HHs would work when imported, but I don't understand how one of the HH members' addresses gets assigned to the HH itself. 

FInally, re: Addressee field, can I just leave it blank for import and have it assigned automatically by the definition?

Any insights would be helpful.  Thanks!
Carl

OK, two more questions/issues.  Maybe better as a separate thread, but I don't want to add unnecessary threads...

First, I went in and deleted the 21 records from the first parent import (by searching on the group I'd created for this import).  That included the 7 blank records, the 7 parent records and the 7 updated HHs.  In doing this, I thought I was just deleting the 7 updates to the HH records but in fact I deleted the HHs themselves.  I selected a normal delete so I could recover if needed, but now I can't find how to un-delete the HH records.  Any hints?

Second, when importing I select the checkbox that the first row is a header (i.e. contains field names), and what happens is the field name row appears to be imported as well.  Odd.  Is this what's supposed to happen?

Carl

Hi Carl,

I don't know the answers to many of your questions, and you may have discovered answers to others.  I would definitely encourage you to start new threads for the questions you still have unanswered.

Jon