Bulk upload

Path to function: Accounts > Bulk upload

Detail pages:

See also: the modify details action.

Introduction:

Bulk upload allows you to create, modify and delete personal accounts (that do not have an administrator role).

When creating accounts it is almost always best to start with the template you can download from the admin area. If you're modifying accounts, you can start with a data download file as your source and modify that to suit the changes you want to make.

You will probably not need to delete accounts by bulk upload unless the accounts you are interested in are too difficult to identify by search.

There are details, but the basic procedure is as follows:

1. Create your upload file, perhaps using the template, and save it as a CSV file.

2. Submit it via the interface
3. The interface will run some validation tests for mandatory fields, length and formatting, and report any errors to you in the browser
4. Once basic validation is passed, the file is transmitted for processing
5. Any lines of your upload that have no errors are processed
6. Any lines of your upload that have errors are rejected and are reported:
   1. In the browser via a link in the error message
   2. In an email to you
   3. The lines with errors are available in file in the download area for correction and re-uploading

Anything to watch out for?

If you have more than 5,000 accounts to upload you will need to split the upload into batches.

Even though you can specify passwords in the upload, it's a bad idea for all kinds of reasons. Set accounts to pending and email user to true - this will let your patrons choose their own secure passwords. If you do absolutely need to include passwords, they must be unique and meet a complexity requirement (see: About usernames, passwords and expiry dates).

Username generation (see: how usernames are generated). 

• If, for any reason, you have lots of users with the same first and last name combination you will run into problems once the system gets to 999 of them 

• Usernames need to be in the ISO-8859-1 character set. You will need to specify them manually if the user's first or last name has any other characters or account creation will fail.