You are here: Chapter 7: Configuration and Administration > Address Book Administration > Populating the Address Book > Load External Data

Load External Data into the Address Book

Note

This option is not available for LDAP- or SQL-enabled Address Books. It is only for use with the FootPrints Address Book.

Before you begin, the Address Book fields must first be created to match the fields in the data to be imported.  Also, the contact data must be placed into a single, flat text file in CSV format.  See Creating the Address Book Data File for details on creating the text file. Only the CSV file format is supported.

To load data from the web screens:

  1. Select Administration | Address Book | Load Data.
  2. Complete the fields as follows:

The data is validated.  If the data is good, the import proceeds.  If bad data is present, an error message displays with the line numbers of contacts containing errors.

If you scheduled the import to occur in the future, the import does not occur until that time.  To remove a scheduled import, click the Review a List of Address Book Load events link.  Imports that are in process cannot be removed.

Load Data As Batch Process

You can import data into the FootPrints Address Book using a batch process without using the web screens. You must prepare the Upload file as described in Create the Address Book Data File. Batch Upload files receive no error checking; they are loaded as-is, so it is essential that your Upload file be properly set up and that it contains no errors.

The batch process is run via the command line interface.

For loading a web queue of Address Book imports, the command is:

perl MRloadBackgroundABData.pl

For importing a CSV file to the Address Book, the command is:

perl MRloadBackgroundABData.pl [args]

where the arguments [args] are:

The default is to not update Master Contact records and to not validate fields in the background except to require that the primary key value be set.

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