Behavior details: Updating records

After you have imported records, the successfully imported records may be transferred or updated.

Transferring adds a new record. If the record already exists the transfer will fail.

Updating changes existing records. This page describes in detail how data is handled by updates.

Only fields/columns included in the CSV are affected by an update

Existing record:

Open

CSV:

Open

Note that it only has two columns.

Updated record:

Only the numberOfObjects field has been changed.

Only populated fields/columns in CSV are changed by an update

Existing record:

In the rest of this article, the updated record from the previous example is the existing record for the following example.

CSV:

Note that I have used the specified static option list value that maps to the “Architecture and Design” display term.

Updated record:

Number of objects, Other number value, and Other number type have not been changed to blank because they were blank in the CSV.

Also note that this update did NOT add “Architecture and Design” as a second responsibleDepartment value. This leads to the next point…

A field affected by an update is completely updated/replaced by the CSV values

Let’s say in our previous example, we were trying to add “Architecture and Design” as a second responsibleDepartment value, but now it’s the only responsibleDepartment in our record. Here is what we need to import to get what we wanted:

CSV:

Updated record:

Individual fields in repeating field groups can be updated

CSV:

Updated record:

Even though the Other number Value and Type are repeatable together as a group, we are able to just update numberType.

Let’s say we use this CSV:

To add another “Other number” to our record:

Then we realize we don’t really know what kind of number “1234” is. We could update ‘lender’ to ‘unknown’ like so:

Resulting in:

Caution: not including all values when updating a repeatable field can cause data loss/corruption

After some research, we determine ‘1234’ is actually a serial number.

We prepare an update CSV:

We’ve forgotten that the numberType value in our CSV should be: serial;previous

If we import and update, we get:

In the underlying XML of the record, we have:

The update process assumes since we’ve only included one numberType, there is only one numberValue, and it has made it so in our record.