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Bulk import for updating users' email address fails with Name: too short

  • July 14, 2021
  • 4 replies
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Lefteris

Hello all,

I am trying to bulk import a .csv (correctly formatted) which will update the email address to all of our internal Zendesk users. For some reason, it succeeds for the first 13 users and then it fails for all the rest with the error message "Name: is too short (minimum one character)".

I looked around for this error message and followed all the advise I could find but nothing changed. Any idea what I might be doing wrong during the bulk import?

My .csv has the following format:

email external_Id
email1@address.com xxxxxxxx
email2@address.com xxxxxxxx
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    4 replies

    Tipene
    • Tipene
    • July 14, 2021

    Hey, Lefteris!

    One instance that this error can occur is when a user/s is being updated using the external_id as a matching reference, but no existing user in your Zendesk account is found by that external_id.

    If that’s the case, the system will attempt to create a new user using the external_id present in the CSV file. If the CSV file does not contain a name value, it will then present the error that you’re seeing on your end.

    Can you take a look at the users you are trying to update to see if they have External IDs associated with them? You’ll see this on the user profile in Zendesk, at the bottom of the left side column.

    Thanks!

    Tipene

    Lefteris
    • Lefteris
    • Author
    • August 10, 2021

    Hello Tipene,

    Thanks for this explanation. It actually clears up a few things.

    I do have external IDs for our Zendesk users, but in order to be able to use them as identifiers in order to bulk update users with their new email address, I need to actually export those external IDs somehow into a .csv or something. I haven't found an easy way to actually export the external_id field off Zendesk from the UI (so without using the API). Do you perhaps or anybody else have any input on how I could export the external_id field of our users?

    Thanks,
    Lefteris

    A
    • Austin22
    • August 12, 2021

    Hey there @Lefteris Apostolakis,

    Great question being asked here, and absolutely: We've got a couple of non-API options available to pull those external IDs, and then a 3rd-party option:

    Explore Queries - Using Explore, you'd be able to create a list of your users where you could also choose to display their external IDs in an additional table column, as well as being able to export your user list as a CSV file.

    Using the Support: Tickets dataset, you could apply a single metric of Users & Organizations > Users, along with 2 attributes for Requester Name and Requester External ID.  We have an Explore recipe available here that'll be perfect to use as a jumping point for your situation here, as you can use this recipe to display all users in your account even if they haven't submitted a ticket before.

    Reports/Export feature - Chances are good that your account owner may have already requested the activation of the Reports feature which'll allow you and other admins to export both ticket and user data.   

    With that feature enabled, you'd be all set to request a User XML export and get your account's user data sent to you in XML format, which'll include their external IDs as well.  There sadly wouldn't be a direct CSV export option for users specifically, but for a quick turnaround you could try out a 3rd-party XML-to-CSV converter like this site here.

    Otherwise for one more 3rd-party solution: I found this Exporter app developed by Sparkly who offers CSV export options for tickets and users.  I haven't had a chance to personally test and confirm if they include external IDs in their user export feature, but with their free trial period, it'd definitely be worth taking a look!

    Lefteris
    • Lefteris
    • Author
    • August 13, 2021

    Hi Austin,

    Thanks for the comprehensive reply. I never even thought about checking Explore forthis, so this was an eye opener. I managed to indeed successfully export the external IDs of the users via an Explore query. Most of the users didn't have an external ID in the first place, so I just randomly generated strings and bulk imported them before re-running the query in Explore to get the full list of users populated with external IDs.

    Afterwards, I just used said external IDs in order to bulk update the new email address for the entire Zendesk user base.

    Thanks so much again for all the help!

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