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February 15, 2014 at 9:43 pm

Dean,

Thanks for looking at that. If Sidney’s right, then the dates wouldn’t be too much of an issue. To be honest, however, I’m pretty sure my dates were correct in that file. It’s so hard to format them like this without using a text editor (every spreadsheet program I tried converts the dates immediately; Excel doesn’t come with that format as a cell formatting option!), and so much was made about this in the forums, that I’ve been paying pretty close attention. Just to be sure, I just downloaded that document out of my sent messages & opened it in Textmate and it looks fine. Here’s a line from it:

8,Level 2 Kids Foil Camp,description,N,2014-level-2-kids-foil-camp,2014-07-21,2014-07-25,9:00:00,12:00:00,20,$199,Y,3,N,Y,Y,2014-01-01,2014-07-21,summer-camps

This makes me almost wonder if you had the same problem — ie, your spreadsheet program converting the dates before showing them to you. I must say you guys have picked a problematic date format to standardize on.

As to the second issue (not sure what this is really — we can call it the “zero or one field”), the iteration of events.csv that I sent you was the very first to attempt using anything besides zeros and ones. In this iteration I was trying to start my numbering where existing events “ID” numbers left off. It was just a guess. (A lot of guessing going on when this csv doesn’t have any documentation….) I promise I’ll stick from zeros and ones from here out, but in any case this couldn’t have caused this issue either. And yes, just to be sure, I changed the numbers back to ones and still have the same issue.

So… you happen to have any other ideas? 🙂

Thanks,
josh

February 17, 2014 at 12:41 pm

Dean,

As I said, it says it works, but even if I reload Event Overview, the filter info still reads thusly:

Filters
Events : All Events (2) | This Month (0) | Today (0) Attendees : All Attendees (2) | This Month (2) | Today ()

I noticed a subtle difference between your date format and my own. I am editing the spreadsheet in Google Drive & have dates like “2014-07-18”. When I download the file as CSV I can check that it’s unchanged. You suggested that I use “2014-7-07”, however — omitting a zero in the months column, where you wouldnt use it anyway. Could this be it?

josh

February 18, 2014 at 9:11 am

Dean –

You’re absolutely right. I didn’t know that filter was available. Indeed if I filter all, I see quite a few events that are inactive. It looks like the dates are all fubar (showing as 1969, which I assume means null or equivalent), while the Attendees field shows numbers like “0/2014-01-01”. This makes me think that my delimiters were parsed incorrectly. Do you happen to know what would cause that? In case a login would help, I’ll submit one now.

Thanks for your help,
josh

February 25, 2014 at 2:07 pm

Ah yes! I had removed blank columns earlier when my formatting was failing validation. Now that I put those empty columns back in, the event dates are fixed, and so events show up as active!

A couple other things.

Categories field: Finally got them to work on import by using the Category Name instead of Unique Category Identifier.
Questuion: Also, I have a bazillion botched events and I’ve deleted them all except the last import. Is there a way to remove these deleted events permanently? Or is direct database action required?

I thank you for your help on what must surely be a tedious forum topic for you. I hate to waste your time with yet another post about csv formatting. It is such a touchy system & so lacking in documentation, though, that I didn’t know what else to do. A little documentation — or simply an Export feature (so that I can compare a CSV composed of existing events) — would save us all a lot of time. In any case I really really appreciate you’re bearing with me.