Importing Relationships (Migrate from another CRM System)

@techsoldaten - thanks for such a cool module!

I agree about the data massaging and do something similar to get a CSV file. What I would love to see is the custom parser and if it would be possible to turn it into an additional module connected to the feeds import modules. Perhaps similar to how commerce_feeds was done.

More specifically, I am looking for how you import the relationships. For example I have a CSV of Individuals and another one for Companies. In the "individual" csv there is a reference to which company they work for. This would be the "employee of" relationship. How would I import this? And as a followup, would other relationships follow a similar import process - even if they are built using the Relation module instead of within CRM core yet use CRM core data?

Thanks again for the help.

I have begun this process and wanted to document a few things for anyone else struggling with this. This is designed for a clean import of new data. I have not tired this out in a working environment with lots of data yet - but I will soon.

Importing New CRM Contacts -> Create User Accounts (Creates the crm_core_user_sync relation when you add a new CRM Contact)
Uses Feeds, Rules

Basic Setup

1. Turn off "Automatically create an associated contact when account is created" @ admin/config/crm-core/user-sync

If you don't do this, you will end up with lots of duplicate contacts.

Feeds Setup

1. Create Feed Importer for CRM Contacts of type Individual
2. Map the fields as you need. -- You need to have unique email addresses so I mapped the email twice. Once for GUID and once for importing into the email field.

Rules Setup:
First watch this: View a screencast about creating relations with Rules
Conditions: [I cannot figure out how to load a screenshot here, so here is a link to it]
Conditions

Actions:
Actions

This will upon saving a new CRM contact, check to make sure it is an individual, ensure there is an email (I am not validating the email here), creating a new User Account and then linking the two together with a new relation.

The trick was to make sure the new user was saved and loaded BEFORE the Contact in the variable list. That is all there is to it.

If you then want to email a notice to the new user, you can do that too but I am going to do that manually for now via VBO from the People page.

@ schismfish

The key to the relationship creation is Rules. I found the easiest way to ensure I got what I wanted was to create a dummy or TEMP content type with the fields I needed. It sounds crazy to do this, but hear me out.

Using feeds importer is great unless you have to cross reference two types of data - one CSV with an ID from the old system and another with email from MailChimp for example. The one with ID doesn't guarantee an email address and the other doesn't have an ID. If you use two Import feeds you end up with duplicates since the GUID is different in each feed.

So, I dumped everything into a temporary spot, then ran a rule component with Views Loop to find the data I needed. You can "Fetch an entity by ID or Property" and with this you can check to see if the relationship already exists or not. Then using another component or Rules Conditional, you can either insert a new one after creating a variable of "List of any entity type" and assigning it the endpoints or not.

Turns out it is not too hard to get all this going and my 6k+ rows with 10k+ relationships was not that hard to get going once I figured out how to use Rules to create the entities.

I made a Rule component that used the Views Rules module to pull the data through the rule one item at a time. Once you have the node entity you can do whatever you need to with the data.