Test then Commit

Do a test run, then commit

When running an import, there's a little checkbox that asks if you want to "commit" changes - and it's unchecked by default for good reason: the best-practice workflow for nailing a CSV import is to do "a test run" first, probably a number of times, until you get it right. Pakk makes that process easy.

Why would you want to do a "test run" of a CSV import? Well, you probably won't get everything right first time. You might have:

• missing required fields

• invalid or conflicting values

• bad cross-references

• incorrect column names

• badly formatted CSV

CSV imports are not an "all or nothing" affair in Pakk - some lines could be correct, and others incorrect. Doing a test run allows us to know which lines are bad without actually affecting our data.

The alternative to this workflow is painful and will probably be familiar enough to those of you that have been in the game long enough: half the records pass, half fail and you then have to spend hours picking through the CSV, working out which ones have already imported and stripping them out, before trying again. That's a horrible waste of time.

So, when you're ready to import, run it without checking the "commit" box and then navigate to the report where you'll get a line-by-line breakdown of what failed and exactly why. You can then fix those errors and try again. Once you've got a "clean" import - or at least as clean as you can - you can check the "commit" box and have your import actually impact the data.