Web App Import turns Item Inactive?

[BethKahlich]

Hi guys I remember in the old forums there was a great answer for this question.

When you export web apps - make changes in Excel - Save as .csv - and re-import the web app items, the date fields are somehow modified to change the expiration date and then it makes all your webapp items inactive.

Does anyone remember the fix? I know it's a quick and easy fix in Excel, but I can't remember it

Thanks so much for you help!

Beth

[Mihai_Tica]

The fix is you need to make sure the "Expiry date" column format is like so - http://screencast.com/t/Nd8tEh3pnlB

[@JoeWellborn]

Thanks Beth and Kahlic. This was a life saver!

[wwwcre8r]

I didn't set a value for Expiry Date (optional), they all imported as 1-Jan-2099, yet they're still all inactive - any ideas?

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Ugh, I just figured out why this is happening - hoping there is a fix for this, I don't want to have to manually set this for every record.

Upon import the Submitted By: value is not set, if I manually edit this and choose myself then save, the record is then active.

Can this be set in the CSV during import?

Message was edited by: wwwcre8r

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Update: I found that by inspecting my name in the Submitted By field, I could determine my EntityID. I entered my EntityID into the CSV, deleted all existing records and re-imported.

Now all records are still marked as inactive, but upon reviewing each, my name is set properly in the Submitted By field.

Now if I simply view each record and click Update without modifying anything... it then makes the record active.

Any thoughts? This has to be a bug.

Message was edited by: wwwcre8r

[Alex_Pavelescu]

Hi,

Have you checked if the column "Enabled (enabled by default)" contains "Y" for all records?

It should allow your webapp item to be enabled even without submitting an EntityID.

Kind Regards,

Alex

[wwwcre8r]

Alex,

I did not, because in the WebAppItemTemplate.csv file that field says that it's optional.

Enabled (enabled by default)

Strange this happened, I came back to the application this morning to find that all of my records were now active and showing up. Not sure why that happened, did I have to wait a day? Did BC do something in the system to fix this? I'm the only admin/ developer on this project, no one else has access or would've done that for me.

I'm tempted to do another import to see what happens...

[Alex_Pavelescu]

Hi,

I double checked, the process is seamless, there's no waiting involved. When you import webapp items, no matter if some of them will be overwriting already existent ones or not, the only scenario in which an item is disabled is that when you have "N" under the "Enabled" column.

Not sure why this might have worked differently until now in your case, but if you come across this behaviour again, please raise a ticket.

Kind Regards,

Alex

[wwwcre8r]

This issue is back, under a new BC site, same issue. I've imported > 600 records into my WebApp, and learning my prior lessons set the EntityID.

They are all INACTIVE, I'm wondering if I wait until tomorrow will they all automagically change to active like last time? I hope so... I need to launch this project on the 4th.

Thanks, William

[wwwcre8r]

Once again, waiting a day did the trick, the next morning all 600+ records were active.

This is the second BC site that the issue has occured on, I would consider this a bug; I can reproduce the issue.

Thanks, William

[Guest · Accepted solution]

Found the solution:

Excel seems to change some of the cells in the Expiry Date to 01-Jan-1999 when the user corrects the .csv dates to the mm-ddd-yyyy format. Easy to miss before importing. The solution is as simple as looking for the 01-Jan-1999 entries and converting them to 01-Jan-9999 after updating the format.

In summary, when working with exported Web App data as a .csv in excel, two issues can occur when re-importing your data:

Issue 1: Excel defaults the format of the both the date fields to "dd-mmm-yy". A user must change the format back to the one BC can understand: dd-mmm-yyyy. Failure to do so will result in all Web App items appearing as (disabled).

Issue 2: When user is trying to resolve Issue 1, Excel can change the default value in the Expiry Date field from 01-Jan-9999 to 01-Jan-1999. When not addressed, some Web App items may appear as (inactive). Correcting the dates before uploading solves Issue 2.

[Guest]

Shout-out to:      Ryan Perez on this thread: Web App Import Bug (Comment 1.)

                         and this article: Troubleshooting imported Web Apps with missing items : iformat

for dittoing this solution.

[peterkoopman]

Actually, to save yourself a lot of work you can just delete all the values in the Expiry Date column. BC will set them all to 01-Jan-9999 by default.

[Jonathan_Horner]

Regarding wwwcre8r's comment that the items become active after a day - this is because Business Catalyst decides to set the Release Date field to the following day rather than the day you actually import your items.

So to avoid inactive items make sure you specify the current date as the Release date.