CSV Import events with same organizer and/or venue name

[irishrunner16]

I’m going to be importing a few thousand events. However, I have a concern as I noticed in Rob’s video it mentions “Updated: An item was found with the same name and/or start date. The existing item was updated with the new item from the file.”

In my import, there will be some events that have the same organizer name or venue name. Will the CSV Importer allow me to import all of those rows or will it import a given organizer name or venue name only once?

[irishrunner16]

So I tried importing a few duplicates as a test and I did find that the importer only allows one occurrence of each venue name and organizer name; if there’s more than one row with the same value, it overwrites the previous ones with the last occurrence.

Is there a workaround to import events that occur on different dates but may have the same venue name or organizer name?

[Kelly]

Hi, irishrunner16. Great question! 🙂

In my experience, events with different titles, but the same venue and/or organizer will import successfully, assuming you’re importing into the event list. For imports into the Venue or Organizer lists, each entry needs a unique name.

Is it possible that the entries are failing because of duplicate event names?

[irishrunner16]

Thanks Kelly. In my testing I was able to upload the events themselves without any problems; the issue I’m having is with the “venues” and “organizers” csv files.

For example, if the venue location is in different states and has different values for the address, city, state and zip, the tool will still overwrite one of the rows if they both have the same “venue name” (such as Heritage Park).

The same problem exists if there are two organizers with the same name (such as “John Smith”). Even if the other organizer data does not match, having the same “organizer name” will cause the other rows to use the incorrect data.

So it looks like I’ll need to do some manual editing and add additional text to the Venue Name and Organizer Name to ensure that those which shouldn’t be viewed as duplicates are not.

Perhaps a future enhancement to the CSV Importer would be to only overwrite the item/row if ALL of the location (venue name, address, city, state, etc) or organizer (organizer name, email, etc) values match, instead of only going by the name field?

[Kelly]

Thanks for the detailed response, irishrunner16. I definitely see what you’re getting at.

Unfortunately, the way the CSV importer works right now is that the Name is the unique identifier for the row. We’d definitely be open to changing that in the future if the community would see value in that. Would you mind suggesting it on our User Voice forum? We’d be very grateful! 🙂

[irishrunner16]

Thanks Kelly, will do!

[Kelly]

Awesome! We really appreciate the feedback! 🙂

 

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