Issues with importing CVS file in Insight

[Daniel Barbis]

Hey, i'm experiencing some issues with the import feature in Riada Insight

I'm trying to import a CVS file into Insight. 

The delimiter in the CVS file is "," however when I chose "," as the delimiter in Insight import confguration it notifies me that it failed to connect to the CVS file buuuuut if I change the delimiter to ";" in the Insight import configuration settings it works just fine until I get to the synchronize part. I synchronize the import and it finds all objects in the external source though all objects has no label in the external source most likely due to the delimiter that Insight is searching for is not the same as in the CVS file. This basically causes the import to I guess fail? since the Objects aren't added to the Object scheme due to no labels being found.

In short, Insight doesn't accept the delimiter used by the CVS file no matter if I change the delimiter in both the CVS file and in Insight import configuration settings.

Would appreciate any help I could get with this.

[PJ Wysota]

Well, it does accept (at least in versions 5.4.X and above). However... there might be some issues:

1. Most common are some text area data or some multi-data information using the same delimiter as import file - be sure that You don't use comma other way than column delimiter. If so - either get rid of these, or change delimiter. :-)

2. Any data coming in CSV created from XLS/XLSX files - make sure that you don't have any columns with #REF or any other "special" characters at the beginning of data string (and frankly - I would avoid as well having them within text strings,

3. You need to setup at least one Insight label (default is Name, but it can be altered), and map it against import data (plus set it up as Identifier - again You can have multiple identifiers)

4. If still nothing - make sure You have turned on logging of Insight import errors and refer to import logs (called insight_import.log - in the JIRA log directory)

[Daniel Barbis]

It seems like none of the above are working, i'll check the logs if I can see something interesting. The only thing that I think would cause this is the structure of the excell file however that shouldn't be an issue although I don't know how this specific parser works.

Also something that I noticed is that the delimiter chosen in Insight is dependant on 3 delimiters inside of the excell file. If I manually set these 3 to ";" but keep the "," for everything else Insight will only allow me to chose "," as delimiter and vice versa if I manually change the 3 delimiters to ",". This all seem very odd to me but i'll try to do some more digging around to fix this and hopefully find a solution.

[Daniel Barbis]

So after checking the logs all I can see is that it's failing to read the dataLocators when I use the correct delimiter but it seems to find the dataLocators when I use incorrect delimiter? Eventhough it imports and syncs with the wrong delimiter it doesn't seem to parse the info into the correct Attributes since it doesn't know what goes where, everything goes into the name attibute (label) which makes sense since the parser doesn't know what is what because the delimiter specified is incorrect from the one used in the file but I just don't get it why can I not use the same delimiter in Insight as in the excel / CVS file?

This makes no sense.....

[PJ Wysota]

I would report it to Riada support in this case. But indeed pretty odd, and I have had no such case (working with Insight for 3 years now).

[Daniel Barbis]

Will do, thanks for taking your time to answer my post, have a nice day sir!

[Dan Papuc]

any progress with this please ? I have the same issue (try to import attributes with multiple values but the delimiter field accept a single value. A multivalue delimiter is "||" which sequence seems to not be accepted by Delimiter... The effect is that for the fields with multiple values the effect of import is ... NULL ... Any idea ?

[PJ Wysota]

I might have one silly, however worth of confirming idea - have You checked (apart from import config and delimiters) cardinality of Insight object attributes? if cardinality is set to max = 1 multiple values will not be populated.

[Dan Papuc]

checked. is unlimited...

[Dan Papuc]

the question is then v simple: how do u configure a csv to import multiple values per attribute ? do u need to specify || delimiter and where/how ? within import config it is not allowed to define more than one character except \t... which does not define multi-value.

[JP _AC Bielefeld Leader_]

Yes, you have to delimit the values for one attribute by ||

Example:

Attribute1;Attribute2;Attribute3

Value1;Value2;Value3.1||Value3.2||Value3.3

Make sure Attribute3 is a Select field & allows for more than a single value. You don't have to create the different values; they are generates automagically on import...

[Marko Isola]

Does it work with Object reference attribute or just with Select? I mean, as an example virtual host can have multiple Data Storages attached to it and I want to import something like this.

Hostname,Data Storages

webhost1,ds1||ds9
webhost2,ds2||ds9
dbhost1,ds2
dbhost2,ds3||ds4||ds5||ds9
dev1,ds6

When importing, only hosts with 1 Data Storage has the imported value and it is linked to DS objectType but those with multiple don't have any. Manually I can add as many as I want.

Cardinality in Data Storage attribute is min:1 and unlimited.

I am gonna face this same issue with Network Switches too. Changing those attributes to Select is not an option 'cause Data Storage (or Network Switches) Object types have additional info, not just name, and those have references  to other ObjectTypes.