During a large migration this week there are varying errors that we came across due to issues with the data being exported. This is just a very brief note about the most cryptic of these errors and a quick fix to hopefully get around it.

While using the DMM (Data Migration Manager) to process CSV files for import into the CRM some files through up the following error:

“The data for this file is not in the required format.”
”The request failed with HTTP status 400: Bad Request.”

After a bit of hunting around and checking out the files it turned out this was being caused by two things, firstly the CSV file had commas inside the text parts (enclosed in double quotes”), this was easily fixed in excel (remember to not let excel butcher your number fields on import). The second cause of the error was due to unprintable characters being included in the import e.g. carriage returns or currency symbols. To fix this error the easiest way seems to be to use Notepad++ to open the csv file, select the whole file and then pick “TextFX”, “TextFX Characters” and “Zap all non printable characters to #”. This will as it says replace all the weird characters with # symbols leaving the data free to import. Chances are you didn’t even need the crazy characters in the first place. Thanks to Theresa for working out the solution to that one.

I imagine there are going to be a few more of this type of error that will be encountered this week. If theres anything that I can’t find a solution to easily around the net I’ll post something here in a “part 2”

[tags]crm 4.0[/tags]