Importing Accounts and Persons

You can import accounts and persons, including their locations, into the OMC. Text files in the CSV format serve as data source for the import. CSV files can be generated by exporting data with other applications (but also with the OMC).

Format of the CSV Files

For the imported records to be interpreted correctly by the OMC, such a CSV file needs to have the structure of a table with column headers and an identical number of cells in every row. An example:

"account_name","account_custom_segment","location_address0","location_country"
"Playground Ltd.","Supplier","Playground Ltd.","Great Britain"

As can be seen from the example above, the first row contains the names of the fields of which every record is made up. Every subsequent row contains a record consisting of the field values. These values must have the same order as the field names in the first row. Every field value (like the field names) must be enclosed in double quotes if it contains spaces or special characters. To be on the safe side, all field names and values should be enclosed in double quotes. The OMC expects exactly one comma as a separator between field names and values.

The encoding of the file to be imported must be UTF-8. On the data import page described below, a complete sample CSV file can be downloaded.

The field names accepted in CSV files are divided into several groups indicated by their prefix:

• account_: The field belongs to an account. Example: account_name
• account_custom_: The field is a custom field belonging to an account. Example: account_custom_segment
• contact_: The field belongs to a person. Example: contact_last_name
• contact_custom_: The field is a custom field belonging to a person. Example: contact_custom_email2
• location_: The field belongs to a location. Example: location_address0

The Import Procedure

If you have a CSV file containing account records, you can import this file into the OMC. Doing this, you can choose between interactive and automatic processing of the imported data.

If the imported records are to be processed interactively, they are temporarily stored in the OMC. Then you can check each record and modify it as desired before having it stored in the OMC, or dismissing it.

With automatic processing, on the other hand, the OMC utilizes the account_id, contact_id, and, if present, the location_id fields to assign the imported records to existing accounts or persons, or to explicitly create new accounts or persons in the OMC. Here, the following rules apply:

• The account_id and contact_id fields must be present. If their values are numbers, the entity referenced (the account or, respectively, the person with this ID) must be present in the OMC.

• If the account_id or the contact_id of a record has the value NEW, a new account or, respectively, person will be created. This might cause duplicates, since NEW is interpreted as an instruction which has precedence over duplicate checking.

• If the account_id of a record has the value REUSE and the contact_id has the value NEW, the first existing account whose name exactly matches the value of the account_name field will be used for the import. To this account a new person is added. If no such account name exists, the OMC will create an account with this name.

• If the location_id field is missing but the record still contains other location fields, a new location will be created unless all the values of the location fields to be imported exactly match the corresponding values of an existing location for the account. The determined or new location will be assigned to the person.

Procedure

On the Accounts main page, click the Import Records button. The following page is then displayed:

If you have already imported data in interactive mode, the number of records waiting to be processed is displayed here. Click Upload Import Records (CSV) to transfer a (or another) CSV file containing records to the OMC by means of the following page:

Click the Select file button and specify the file to be uploaded. Check Process Unattended if the records in your CSV file follow the rueles above, or leave the option unchecked if you wish to edit and import the records interactively (attended processing). In both cases, the data import main page is again displayed after the data have been uploaded. In interactive mode, however, the number of uploaded records is displayed:

To edit a record and decide whether it should be imported, click Process next record. Click Delete All Import Records to remove all the remaining (but not yet imported) records from the OMC.

Note that the OMC selects the next record randomly, not sequentially. On the editing page, all fields from the record are selected whose values are different from the corresponding field values stored in the OMC (this page has been shortened for reasons of space):

If required, select the field values to be imported. Then click Import/Update Data if you do not need to make any other changes to the record. Otherwise, click Edit Data Before Import. The latter opens a form for editing the account und person fields.

Click Don’t Import This Record if you want the record concerned to be removed from the uploaded data pool without importing it. Click Cancel to stop processing the data and continue later on.

After the record has been imported, the number of remaining records is again displayed. Klick Process next record to continue matching the data of another record.