Miva Merchant 4 Module FAQs » Customer Import (VIK_CUSTIMPT)

How to Use Customer Import

This module is used for importing customers from a flatfile.

The format for the flatfile is:

login|password email|password|first name|last name|password email|company|phone|fax|address|city|state|zip|country|billing first name|billing last name|password email|billing company|billing phone|billing fax|billing address|billing city|billing state|billing zip|billing cntry

In this example, we have used the pipe character "|" a the delimiter (the character that separates the fields from each other). You can use tabs, commas, or anything else you like, but we recommend using the pipe. For whatever delimiter you use though, you need to make sure that that particular character does not appear in your data itself.

For example, this would NOT work correctly:

login|person@site.com|long&complex#@$@#|@#23password|Richard|Smith| etc.

The reason this would not work is that the pipe character in the middle of the (admittedly strange) password contains the pipe character, which will therefore confuse the import, making it think that there are more fields to be imported than there actually are. This problem is especially compounded if you have a tab delimited file as the tabs often cannot be seen--they look just like spaces. Thus, it's best to use the pipe character, which is a seldom used symbol.

Here is an example of a working flatfile:

login11|l1@l.com|pw1234|bob|smith|l1@l.com|comp|1234567890|1234567890|123 Qwerty St|New York|NY|12029|US
login12|l2@l.com|pw12345|bert|brown|l2@l.com|comp|1234567890|1234567890|123 Qwerty St|New York|NY|12029|US
login21|l3@l.com|pw123456|bret|jones|l3@l.com|comp|1234567890|1234567890|123 Qwerty St|New York|NY|12029|US
login22|l4@l.com|pw1234567|bill|smith|l4@l.com|comp|1234567890|1234567890|123 Qwerty St|New York|NY|12029|US
login31|l5@l.com|pw12345678|bambi|brown|l5@l.com||1234567890|1234567890|123 Qwerty St|New York|NY|12029|US
login32|l6@l.com|pw123456789|belinda|jones|l6@l.com||1234567890|1234567890|123 Qwerty St|New York|NY|12029|US

In this example, you'll notice that login31 and login32 don't have an entry in the company field--and that is fine. Fields can be left blank. The "Bill To" fields have also been left out, but if you want to import those as well, your file will look something like this:

login41|l41@l.com|pw1234|bob|smithers|l41@l.com|comp|1234567890|1234567890|123 Qwerty St|New York|NY|12029|US|boss|man|boss@l.com|Boss Ltd|1234567890|1234567890|123 Asdf St|New York|NY|12029|US

How to Make a Flatfile:

A flatfile is simply a text file, so pretty much any database or spreadsheet program can be used for creating the flatfile. You can use Excel for this, but it does have some quirks. Excel will generally put quote marks around some text so you may need to open any flatfiles exported from Excel to remove the quote marks.

416/14%Last update: 2003-08-12 22:15
Author: Support
Revision: 1.0

Please rate this entry:

Average rating: 0 out of 5 (0 Votes )

completely useless 1 2 3 4 5 most valuable

You cannot comment on this entry