Preventing Duplicates when Importing UI Extensions
The Source and Source ID fields have been added for UI extensions. These fields are hidden, but they do show up in the audit trails and in the export files. They have now also been added to UI extensions to help account administrators when they have exported UI extensions from their QA account and want to import them into their production account.
Having these fields available in the import files allows organizations to avoid creating duplicates when they encounter issues while performing imports.
Avoiding the creation duplicates when rerunning an import is easy thanks to the Source and Source ID fields. It is done by setting a value in the Source column (e.g. ‘Import’ or ‘QA’) and specifying a unique value in the Source ID column for each UI extension that needs to be created during the import. The unique value can, for example, be today’s date followed by a counter (e.g. 2019-04-30-0001).
Having a unique value in the Source ID column makes it possible to rerun the same import CSV over and over without creating duplicates. The reason why this works is that when the “ID” column is empty in the import file (which it always is when importing new records), 4me checks to see if a record already exists with the Source ID that is specified in the import file. If so, 4me will update that record. If not, 4me registers a new record.
This is extremely helpful when a few errors are detected during an import. These errors can then be corrected in the import CSV file, after which the updated file can be imported again without first having to remove the rows that were already processed successfully.