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[Daniel Zook]

Hi,

I’m working on importing data into R3 and needed to figure out how to import multiple contact information records (e.g. multiple phone numbers) for customers and vendors.  After spending a few hours “Googling” and trial and error, I discovered that it is actually a lot easier than I thought: all you need to do is put all the phone numbers into the “Phone” field, separated by a semicolon (or whatever your multiple value separator is).

For example:

Phone: 111-867-5309;111-555-1212
PhoneName: Home Phone; Work Phone

The first item in the field is automatically set as primary, and the value from the corresponding “PhoneName” is set as the description.  After it is imported into AX it looks like this…

Description     Contact number/address  Primary
Home Phone  111-867-5309                   Yes
Work Phone   111-555-1212

This works for the Email / EmailName and TeleFax/TeleFaxName (fax).
This also works for ODBC source data formats, even though AX doesn’t give you an option for the “multiple value separator” for that type of source data.  Using semicolon works in that scenario.
This also works for things like the External Item Ids when importing Products.

Hope this helps someone else who needs to use DIXF to import customers or vendors.

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Daniel Zook
Director of IT
Lehman’s
Dalton OH
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[Bob Parsons]

Hi Daniel …

Wow – thank you a million times over for the tip. I have been importing our master data and was running into the exact same issue.

My solution was to do multiple iterations of the data upload to update the records with the 2nd, 3rd, 4th … emails and phone numbers. This was causing a few minor issues with clean up afterwards, and it always felt like i was using a sledge hammer to get the data in correctly. This will save me multiple hours of work and on top of that it should increase our data integrity (i.e. I won’t have to go through the ‘clean up’ afterwards).

Cheers, and thanks again
Bob

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Bob Parsons
ERP Finance Lead
Star Produce
Saskatoon AB
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[Daniel Zook]

Glad to hear it Bob.   Thanks for letting me know that my post helped someone.  🙂

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Daniel Zook
Director of IT
Lehman’s
Dalton OH
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[Greg Griffith]

In D365 FnO, another way to import multiple rows of contact data would be to use the Data Entity for “Party contacts” in Data Management.  

You can enter the data manually then do an export to see how it shows up there.

In preparing an import, you will want to look up the PARTYID for Customers, Vendors and other Party Roles.  

For an overview, see: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/unified-operations/fin-and-ops/organization-administration/overview-global-address-book

Relevant Data Entities include:

• Party Contacts
• Global address book v2 (Includes PARTYNUMBER and ADDRESSLOCATIONID)
• Customer details v2
• Vendors v2
• Customer postal addresses
• Vendor postal addresses

It’s been a while since I worked with Party Contacts but the data relationships are there and the rows can be imported.

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Greg Griffith
Sr. Consultant
Hitachi Solutions America, Ltd.
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