Hi All
Just needing a push in the right direction - I'm sure this is possible but I'm not sure where to start...
I've just finished setting up a fairly simple CRM setup for our company - for the purposes of this posts, lets say we've got just a few tables - Customers, Contacts, and Jobs.
Within Servoy, I've got all the appropriate relations set up (ie, Customers to Contacts, Customers to Jobs, Etc) - and it works happily.
The next task is to bring in the 1000's rows of old data stored in excel spreadsheets and google docs. These are of course not databases - I've got a single excel sheet with customers, contacts and jobs all in the same row, ie :
<CustomerName><Contact First><Contact Last><ContactTel><JobName><JobDescription>
I've used Google's refine tools (http://code.google.com/p/google-refine/) to clean up these lists, so now I've got a huge spreadsheet, nicely formatted where all of the errors have been corrected (ie Company1 and company1 are now the same) and its as clean as a non-related sheet can be.
What I'd like to do now is import this sheet into the CRM, while retaining the relation information. There are plenty of duplicates (for example, multiple contacts on the same company means a row for each contact, which means a duplicate rows for companies) that i'd like to combine when they get imported.
Could somebody point me in the right direction here? I guess I need to write a method that imports all the customer data, then starts again, and somehow reconciles the contacts to each customer so that the relations are added? Just a little stuck!