Import - meetings records into new database

[Chad]

Hi Everyone,
I am very new to this and may not be asking the questions the right way of google to get the answer I am after.

I have been doing all my sales calls and appointments in excel spreadsheets for years and still have them all saved. I have now setup the EspoCRM on my home server to try and organise things better.

What I am trying to achieve is to import all my meetings into the system and because they are all new, they have no prior contacts in the system. So what I think I have to do is:
1- import the excel (now csv) files into the system as contacts first.
2- then reimport the same csv file as meetings (but with different fields used). The problem I face here is how to I "relate" the meeting to the contact that the meeting was with? (I don't want to relate it to an account). I am not sure how to get my "contacts" into the meeting and relate them to the meeting import. All my meetings will have an email address that can be related to a contact, so I can relate it to that. I have no idea how to set up that relationship in the settings either or to point them into the correct layout after I have created the right entity in meetings to them important them and have the meeting attached to a particular contact.
3 - I have created a meeting notes entity that the notes from each of my meetings will be saved as and I seem to be able to import that okay.

Any help would be appreciated, or even a link to show me where someone has done something similar in the past and I can try and learn from that?

Thank you

Chad

[Chad]

Maybe a simpler way of asking the question?

Can I do an import and link my meetings by the email address (instead of any UID/Uer ID/ Assign ID etc)? I want the email address to be the unique identifier to link the records (contact + meeting notes from the import) to go together.

I don't want to bring them in singularly as there are maybe 8 or 900 records I need to bring in. Each time I bring in a new one it will be between 30 and 90 records at a time and I don't want to input them one at a time either if a single import will do the trick.

Thank you for your help.

[Chad]

So I still have no luck linking the meeting to a contact.

It seems to be to do with the "parent" option. Making that choose the type "Contact" on the import. Then making the contact field link with the "email" as the unique identifier so that the meeting I have imported is related to a particular contact.

I have tried doing an export from what I had previously imported to get the exported columns to match the fields. However I am not sure which columns is the meeting ID or the contact ID (UID???).

Any suggestions on how to import a MEETING that will be directly connected with a CONTACT (Not an account) in the database? And then show the meeting up in the contacts history and or meetings area of their page?

Thank you.

[Chad]

Can Meetings be linked by contact Email when importing new meetings?

[Ashif Malayil]

Hi Chad,
Please try out this method. I’m not sure if this is the correct approach, but put a formula in Contact as name=emailaddress; (Select all and Recalculate the formula) and then try importing it into Meeting with the email ID in the Contact field.

Kindly test it out and check if it works. If it does, you should be able to import meetings without any issues. I haven’t tried it myself, so please confirm whether this works.

[yuri]

Assuming you have a CSV with meeting entries where contacts are specified only with an email address. Assuming you have contacts already in the CRM.

1. Create a custom one-to-many relationship between contact and a Meeting. You can add the Contact field to the meeting's detail view just for convenience.
2. Create a Foreign field in the Meeting entity type. Select Link = Contact, Field = Email, check "Relate on Import".
3. Now, you can import meetings from a CSV file, select Contact Email field for the column that contains email addresses.

Next, you can utilize formula to migrate data from the Contact link to Contacts link.

if (contactId) {
    $contactsIds = list();
    $contactsIds = array\push($contactsIds, contactId);
    contactsIds =  $contactsIds;
}

Then, select all imported records on the list view (use 'select all results' from the dropdown), and run Re-Calculate formula.

After that, you can remove the custom field and relationship if you won't need to import more in future.

[Chad]

Thank you Ashif and Yuri for your reply's. I am yet to attempt working on them.

Yuri: I will always have to import my meetings and link to them contacts after every sales trip and every trade show. This will happen every month or every couple of months. Anywhere from 15 to 100 meetings to be imported every time I return from a sales visit. From your above reply, I take it that your option is something that should not always be implemented, only for a "once off" occasion.

From this, I possibly have misunderstood the relationship between meetings/contacts/accounts/leads etc. Should I create a new equivalent or "meetings" as an entity that I can import my meetings/appointments with in the future? This import would easily be linked to each contact during the import (by the email address) ?

I don't think it is smart to link bulk imports of meetings to a "name" eg: John Chen, Ann Smith etc as I can have multiple people in the same industry with the same name, however they will not have the same email address (I also have not been able to link the parent to a name anyway during import). So I need to be able to import by email address as the "Key" or "Unique ID".

Ashif: Where specifically am I writing that code? name=emailaddress (is that in the field of "parentType" or "parentId" on the import?)

Yuri: If I am to add that code, do I follow these instructions?
- https://docs.espocrm.com/development...andard-fields/
Or am I supposed to add the code you linked to somewhere else in the software?

[Ashif Malayil]

Hi Chad, name=emailaddress; should be placed inside the Contact formula API before save script section. This will change the Contact record name to the respective email ID. Once this change is applied, when importing in Meetings, you will see two fields for mapping: Contact Name and Contact ID. You can then map the column containing the email address in your CSV file to the Contact Name field. Make sure there are no duplicate Contacts with the same email address. Kindly test it out and check if it works.

Note: Update all existing contacts so that the formula is applied and reflected correctly.