contact import process

Question

1. I am importing 955 contacts and assigning them a tag or a group (or both). Time estimate showing is 20 minutes.
2. During the import the connection times out.
3. After waiting a long while, I go back to CiviCRM and look at the group or tag and see that they now have 955 contacts listed whereas before the import both were 0.

A) How can I quickly see if the import was successfully finished?

B) Is adding the contacts to a group or tag one of the last steps for the import process?

C) If the contacts are now listed in the previously empty group or tag, does that indicate that the import was successful?

Answer 1

Look at MySQL and find the temporary table. It will be names something like "civicrm_tmp_d_dflt_..."

Search status=NEW and that will tell you the number of rows left to import. Once the table has no NEW rows to import it is done and the table will be removed. If it did not succeed the table will still exist. I find this the best way to monitor the progress of imports using the default importer.

Answer 2

Workarounds include

• add a custom field purely to track the import by adding a 1,2,3 etc column in your import
• sometimes screens can time out but the import runs regardless, so having the above helps confirm if it really has stopped or not
• hunt down some tickets about tweaking server so it runs for longer