This page lists the errors and warnings you might encounter while using the CSV Importer. It includes those you might see in the application web interface, and those you might find in the CSV reports generated by the Processing and Transferring steps.

The errors and warnings are listed in the order you would likely encounter them in a typical workflow.

There is some explanation of what each error means, and what you should try in order to fix it.

If you encounter an error or warning you do not find explained here, please let us know and we will add it!

Warnings vs. Errors

At the BATCH level:

• Error indicates an issue blocking the creation or processing of the batch as a whole.

• Warning indicates a possible issue with the batch as a whole that you should check out. If the issues mentioned by warnings are deemed not of concern, you can proceed. Warnings do not block moving to the next step.

At the RECORD level within a batch:

• Error indicates an issue specific to that record, preventing it from being processed into a transferable CollectionSpace XML record, or preventing a CollectionSpace XML record from being transferred to the CollectionSpace instance specified in the connection used for the batch. Other records in the batch are not affected by this record’s inability to be processed and/or transferred, but this record will be skipped in subsequent steps.

• Warning indicates a possible issue with a specific record. As at the batch level, you may proceed past a warning if you determine the effects are intended or ok.

Outside the context of batch creation and workflow steps, any issues encountered are likely APPLICATION errors, related to unexpected input or inability to properly connect to a CollectionSpace instance.

Creating a connection

Request error user account lookup failed

The CSV Importer could not log in to your CollectionSpace instance using the Url, Username, and Password you entered.

Check that the Url, Username, and Password are correct. The Url should be the base Url for the Services API associated with your CollectionSpace instance.

Creating a batch

Uploaded CSV is invalid

The CSV you uploaded is not readable by the CSV Importer. As the Open Data Institute says, “CSV looks easy, but it can be hard to make a CSV file that other people can work with.” Issues could include things such as:

• different operating systems' end-of-line characters mixed together in the same file

• rows with different numbers of columns

• stray/unclosed quotes

• …and many more

If you have received this error, some specific error messages will have been listed in the body of the error. These errors were identified by a tool called Csvlint, and you can look up what the specific mean errors mean in their error documentation.

The “unknown_error” message isn’t very informative, but we know the following issue(s) can trigger it:

• Some combinations of mixed line endings (i.e. line break characters) and blank lines in your file. Removing blank lines usually fixes the issue.

See User Manual: CSV Importer: Dealing with invalid CSVs for how to find/remove blank lines, and deal with other invalid CSV issues.

Uploaded CSV contains characters with invalid encoding

The error message in the CSV Importer gives you a lot of information. Read that carefully.

It gives you a list of invalid characters in context. If that list is three lines long, that means you have 3 different invalid characters (each of which may occur 300 times in your file!) Unfortunately the CSV Importer can’t show you the actual bad characters, because the web application only knows how to render valid UTF-8 characters. Since we don’t know where the bad characters came from or what their correct encoding is, we can’t force them into valid UTF-8 equivalent characters.

If there are many rows in the list of invalid characters, re-open your CSV and make sure you save it with UTF-8 encoding. (How to do this varies per application. Consult User Manual: CSV Importer: Saving Files as CSV and/or your application’s manual.

See User Manual: CSV Importer: Dealing with invalid CSVs for tips on finding characters with invalid encoding.

CSV contains invalid blank rows

See User Manual: CSV Importer: Dealing with invalid CSVs for how to find/remove blank rows.

CSV has invalid end-of-line character on last row

The error message you see in the CSV Importer explains how to fix this one.

If you need further assistance, contact your normal source of CSV Importer support and provide the file.

Malformed CSV

When you receive this error, we aren’t able to know exactly what the issue is. Information in User Manual: CSV Importer: Dealing with invalid CSVs might be useful in figuring it out.

If you cannot determine what the problem is, contact your normal source of CSV Importer support and provide the file.

Batch processing steps

Preprocessing

WARNING: Fields that will not import

If any field names are listed here, data from those columns will not go into CollectionSpace.

It is fine to go forward if you know your data has extra, un-importable columns. If this is unexpected, check your column names against the relevant CSV template.

Note: column headers/field names are case insensitive. The header is downcased for processing, so column names are returned in all lower case.

ERROR: One or more headers in spreadsheet are empty

There is at least one column that contains data, but nothing in the header row. The Processing step will not know what to do with the data in this column.

Open

Column C is has an empty header

Either add a field name in C1, or delete column C

ERROR: Required field missing

At least one required column is missing from your CSV. The message will tell you specifically what column(s) you need to add.

Note that use of the CSV Importer requires every row/record have a unique record id. This is not a requirement of the CollectionSpace application itself, so you may get errors here about required fields that you don’t have to populate if you are entering one record at a time manually.

ERROR: In one or more rows, required field empty

Open

Row 3 lacks the required objectNumber value

The required column is present in your CSV, but one or more rows has no value in that column. The message tells you what column(s) to examine in your data.

Open your CSV and sort or filter on those columns to find the blank ones. Enter appropriate values or remove affected rows from the CSV.

Processing

Report type: processing_report

• Contains all data from your originally uploaded file

• Error and Warning information is added to columns at the end (right) of your file. The presentation of the error information is designed to allow you to sort/filter to rows with the same error.

• Warnings may or may not be true problems for you and your data. They are intended to flag possible data quality issues. Some of these may be expected and acceptable to you, so you can proceed with warnings, but it is important to always review warnings.
  For example, you may receive an “Unknown value in option list” warning. If you discover you have put “Permanent collection” in your data instead of the required “permanent-collection”, then you need to fix that before load. If you are adding “new-collection” to the collection dropdown but your admin hasn’t added it to the list of usable terms, you can go ahead and load this data with the warning. Once your admin has added the term, everything should work as expected. You just need to ensure you are using the system-expected under-the-hood value, not the display value. 

Report type: uniq_missing_terms

This report is only available if your data included authority or vocabulary terms that are not already present in your CollectionSpace instance

• The report contains one row per unique not-found term. That is, if you have used a new term for a given vocabulary/authority in 100 different records or fields, it will appear here once. 

• The report has four columns: term type (i.e. personauthorities), term subtype (i.e. person or ulan_pa), identifier (the “shortID” the mapping process created for the new term), and value (the term value as it was found in your original data)

• The intent of this report is two-fold: 

  • If new terms are unexpected, you can use this information and search your CollectionSpace instance to investigate whether case differences, punctuation differences, or typos caused your terms not to match. Then you can update your original file with the expected term form. OR…

  • If you want to create fuller term records, before linking this data to the terms, you can use the values in this form to create new CSVs for separate batch import of term records. To do that:

    • Filter this report to a given type/subtype combination (i.e. local person names)

    • Copy the values out into the termDisplayName column of the Person CSV template

    • Add in any more details you’d like to import

    • Batch import each of those CSV forms (one batch per term type).

Warnings and errors

The following describe what you may see in the processing_report CSV.

ERR: multiple_matching_records_found

More than one record with this row’s ID value were found in your CollectionSpace instance when we attempted to check the record status.

Records with this error will not be transferred, since the CSV Importer has no way of knowing which of the matching records you want to update or delete.

The solution to this error is:

• Search your CollectionSpace instance for the records with this id

• Add something to the id values in the CollectionSpace records having duplicate id values, so that the id values are unique. (This can be done temporarily, to facilitate the batch ingest, or permanently)

• Update the id values in your batch CSV to match the id values of the intended records in CollectionSpace

ERR: unparseable_date

The processor cannot convert the given date value into a valid plain (i.e. non-structured) date value.

Records with this error will not be transferred, since you would lose the data in any field(s) with this error.

The processing report tells you the affected column and unparseable date value for each record with this error.

The solution to this error is to use a date format that is accepted by the field you are trying to import data into. For example, if you get this error in Object annotationDate field, test that the date value you enter into the CSV is accepted by the application if you manually enter it into the Annotation Date field of a record.

ERR: unsuccessful_csid_lookup_for_object_or_procedure

This error will be encountered while ingesting object, procedural, object hierarchy, or non-hierarchical relationship records.

It means the record (or, in the case of ingesting relationships, one of the records) you are attempting to create/update/create a relationship with in the batch cannot be found by the identifier value used in the CSV.

TIP: It is using a “matches” (e.g. exact) search to try to find the appropriate record, so watch out for leading/trailing spaces in your CSV and in identifiers recorded in CollectionSpace.

If you get this while loading relationship records, you need to check that the records specified in both item1_id and item2_id columns exists in your CollectionSpace instance. Otherwise, check the identifier recorded for the record type you are loading (objectNumber, acquisitionReferenceNumber, etc.).

WARN: boolean_value_transform

One or more values in a boolean field in your CSV was something other than true or false. The processor has attempted to convert your 0, 1, y, n, or other value into true or false, but you may want to review that the values you gave it were converted as expected.

The processing report tells you what each value triggering this warning was converted to, so that you may review.

WARN: case_insensitive_match

You will see this warning if your CSV:

• Uses an authority or vocabulary term in a controlled field; BUT

• The Importer cannot find that term in your CollectionSpace instance via an exact match; HOWEVER

• The Importer did find the term in your CollectionSpace instance with a case-insensitive search.

In this case, the CSV Importer will use the term found via the case-insensitive search, but it lets you know it is using something other than the exact term in your CSV.

The warning shows you the column/field in which the aff