Importing data for multi-select field where options contain commas

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1

Does anyone know if it is possible to import data to Multi-select fields when the Options in the menu individually contain commas? For example, my three multi-selct Options might be:

Part before comma 1, part after comma 1

Part before comma 2, part after comma 2

Part before comma 3, part after comma 3

An individual record may have selected all three options. If you try to import these selections from a .xlsx or .csv, all that happens is that six new items are added to the multi-select Options (one for the string on each side of each comma-separated string).

If you wrap each item in double or single quotes (as Knavi suggests - although after several prompts it admits that this doesn’t work), that doesn’t help - the new Option items just contain the quote characters! Line breaks don’t work either.

If this is a hard constraint and multi-select Options just shouldn’t ever contain commas within them (if you ever want to be able to do bulk updates), we will replace with some other character, but I want to make sure there is no way of making this work.

Thanks!

2

Hi @Serve, I’ve tried a couple of methods, but unfortunately I don’t think there’s any way around this. My suggestion is to replace your commas with a ;, |, or / in your options.

I’ve made a feature request on your behalf to allow for a changeable delimiter, if you’d like to upvote it here.

The only other technical way is to import via the API using array values

{ 
  "field_xx": [
    "Part before comma 1, part after comma 1", 
    "Part before comma 2, part after comma 2"
]}

I also have a solution here that I built to import records via the live app, which would get around your issue.

3

Thanks Stephen - appreciate the quick response. It’s as I expected. I think we will make do with an alternative character for now, as you suggest. Thanks for the links though.

4

Hi @Serve and @StephenChapman ,

This looks to be an issue on our side, we’ve got a ticket in to fix it.

Thanks!

Kara