We’re making use of Airtable to help manage our delivery menu for bud.com. Airtable’s CSV Import Block helps to bring on new products for various regions into our overall catalog.
Now we’re running into an issue with field mapping in the CSV Import Block: Airtable mixes up the fields to match as we import different spreadsheet, and there’s no way to quickly reset the import system.
Details:
We import a CSV of items from Sacramento using the Airtable CSV Import block. We have matching field names for the import data, so the fields show up matching immediately - hurray! We are importing fast.
Then we go to import a CSV of items from Oakland. The Oakland fields are about 95% the same, but with a few different field names, and a different order to the fields.
For this second CSV, even if they have many overlapping field names, AirTable will suggest non-matches - ignoring direct matches.
So if we had matched these fields for a Sacramento CSV import:
Published <= Published
Weight (g) <= Weight (g)
Categories <= Categories
When we load the Oakland CSV, the field mapping suggestions would be:
Published <= Weight (g)
Weight (g) <= Categories
Categories <= Published
We have over 100 fields so there’s a lot of matching and rematching we’re doing here to avoid data mistakes during frequent data updates.
We were hoping to ask the Airtable CSV Import Block to just re-index all the fields, to look for matches as it seems to do on the initial import. But we can’t figure out how to do that:
If we toggle the individual fields off, and then back on, the mis-matches returned. If we quit our AirTable desktop app and restart, the mismatched field mappings are the same.
Here’s a feature wishlist for Airtable’s CSV Import Block to better manage field mappings:
- Add a reset button to ditch cached field mappings and re-acquire field mappings based on the current file
- Add a save / load function for field mappings
- Allow find/search to be able to locate fields in the left column for matching
- Show the CSV file name uploaded in the CSV import / field matching view so we can be reminded which data set we are importing as we scroll through the many fields
Maybe some of those things are already possible, I just don’t know how yet? Thanks for your time.