Author Topic: including Internal ID in all Exports and Reports (or having a checkbox for this) (Read 462 times)

petednz · July 31, 2014, 11:40:19 pm

hi - was surprised that I couldn't find more discussion about this in years gone by and suspect it might have been on IRC.

Once again I had to help a client out of the situation where they had done an export to do some data cleansing and were reading to reimport - and no they didn't have the Internal ID in their export, so the re-import could become nightmare-ish.

I know i flagged in past the idea of having Internal ID always set in all Exports but for some reason I thought this had been incorporated. Presuming it is just my imagination, rather than this having been added then lost, what do others think about the idea that upon creation of a new Export Mapping, the Internal ID is automatically provided as the first field and can hence be overridden by the user? (or is automatically included but not shown on the Mapping?)

Pretty sure I raised similar question about Report csv export also by default including the Internal ID (for Contact reports obviously)?

ANyone any thoughts? Is this as trivial as I think it might be?

Or would a better alternative be a checkbox (on Exports) near the 'save this field mapping' that says 'include Internal ID in Export' to maybe help people think about doing this?

joanne · August 01, 2014, 12:31:21 am

Quote

I thought this had been incorporated. Presuming it is just my imagination, rather than this having been added then lost,

Funny about that Pete, I thought in 4.2 that Internal contact Id was always included for contact exports and membership ID for membership exports but perhaps it was my imagination also.

I think it makes sense to include by default the primary identifier for that export. ie Internal contact Id for contact exports; membership ID for membership exports; participant ID for participant exports; contribution ID for contribution exports. It is much easy to delete the column if for some reason it should definitely not be in the export, but much harder to cope with it's absence in some situations.

I also have been caught out with someone exporting info modifying it and expecting me to import it without the primary identifier. I probably could have worked out a way to match it up, but I didn't want it happening again so I did another export for them and made them re-do their changes. (Fortunately it wasn't thousands of entries.)

petednz · August 01, 2014, 12:39:34 am

hi joanne - maybe the Internal ID was only working on southern hemisphere 4.2 and then got overwritten in 4.4 or somesuch.

Ok that provoked me enough to go test on a 4.2.x site and this is what I see

on left, a 4.2, select Individual, automatically get offered Internal ID as default field

on right, a 4.4, select Individual, automatically get offered 'select field' (same on 4.5)

maybe that is why we both thought it was a bit more 'default' than it is now. at least it used to at least pose the thought 'hmm is this useful to me'

Team, is this a regression? Any chance of squeezing in to 4.5? (yeah i know it is REALLY late to ask)

joanne · August 01, 2014, 04:21:29 am

Have just checked on sandbox rather than relying on my memory, and for event, contribution and member the primary identifier IS included when you export , even if you don't select it.

So it is just the contact id that used to be offered (or perhaps even included?) in 4.2 and is not in 4.4 or 4.5 (skipped 4.3 so don't know when it went missing)

CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

News:

Author Topic: including Internal ID in all Exports and Reports (or having a checkbox for this) (Read 462 times)

petednz

including Internal ID in all Exports and Reports (or having a checkbox for this)

joanne

Re: including Internal ID in all Exports and Reports (or having a checkbox for this)

petednz

Re: including Internal ID in all Exports and Reports (or having a checkbox for this)

joanne

Re: including Internal ID in all Exports and Reports (or having a checkbox for this)