How to associate Account with Contact via import

Good afternoon –

I am attempting to import a sizable list of people and companies into an OroCRM installation. I see that the data template for importing an Account contains what appear to be 3 associated contacts:

Default Contact First Name
Default Contact Last Name
Contacts1 First name
Contacts1 Last name
Contacts2 First name
Contacts2 Last name

However, I’ve tried running the importer several times while populating these fields with existing contacts, and no association between the new account and the existing contact seems to persist. The account is created, but the contacts are empty. There doesn’t seem to be a way to import Contact data with a reference to an Account, so this appears to be the only native way to keep the link between a person and their company. It will be very time consuming to manually associate roughly 5,000 contacts with roughly 3,500 companies, so I am very interested in a better way.

Thank you,

Aaron

Topic

[Artem LiubeznyiSpectator]

Hi Aaron,

It definitely looks like a bug of CSV import, but we were not able to reproduce it on our dev instance. Can you please provide more details on your environment so our QA team might help? Thank you in advance.

[llama-aaronParticipant]

Here you go:

Package Name Version License
oro/doctrine-extensions 1.0.7 MIT
oro/platform 1.7.0 MIT
oro/crm 1.7.0 OSL-3.0
oro/crm-enterprise 1.9.0 Commercial

Let me know if you need anything else. Out of curiosity, what is the intended behavior?

[Artem LiubeznyiSpectator]

By default existing Contacts should be linked.

Thank you for the details, I will pass them to our QA team and we will check for this issue.

[llama-aaronParticipant]

If it helps, here are the steps to reproduce.

1. Import a Contact. Do not attach it to an account.
2. Import an Account, with matching first and last names to the Contact you previously created.
3. The Account is created, with no associated contacts.

I have verified that the importer is working – the account is created with the proper name, the owner is set (if specified in the import file). But the contacts don’t follow over.

[Vita PogrebnyakParticipant]

Hello.

Please try to do import using the following steps:
1. Download Data template for Accounts.
2. Fill Data template file with your data (plz, make sure that your Contact’s first and last names are the same in file and in Contact with which Account should be linked).
3. Import file.

Also, after import will be done open Account record on view to make sure that Contacts are linked/not linked. Note that related Contact’s data will be available on grid only if one of Contacts was marked as default – open Account on edit and check radiobutton for default Contact.

Please check correctness of your import data or you can provide us with your file’s layout – it would be very helpful to identify the issue.

Let us know about the results or ask any question.

Thanks.

[diglinParticipant]

Hi,

I did what you explained but in my case it didn’t create automatically a new account for an imported contact. However it assigns correctly an imported contact to an existing account.

Is it an issue or not a feature ?

Thx for you reply

Regards
Sylvain

[Vita PogrebnyakParticipant]

Hi Sylvain

Correct, that’s how our import functionality works – in contacts import file you can define to which existing account imported contact should be linked. The same schema works for accounts import.
Also, you can leave account/contact fields blank in import file. In this case newly imported records will not be linked to any existing account or contact.

Thanks for question.
Vita

[Author]

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