Configuration Options

Url Title

DataGrab’s default behaviour is to generate an entry’s url title from the entry’s Title field (as it would if you were publishing an entry manually). If you need the entry to have a specific url title then you can specify which field of the data source to use.

Note, that URL Titles cannot be made entirely from numbers. If your titles are numeric, then you can use the Publish Page Customization options under the Channel Preferences to add a URL Title Prefix.

Date

DataGrab will attempt to read your date in whatever format you provide. For best results use YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss. Try to avoid ‘ambiguous’ formats, such as DD/MM/YY or MM/DD/YY.

Duplicate Entries

DataGrab can check whether entries already exists and if they do it can skip or attempt to update the existing entry.

To check for an existing or duplicate entry, DataGrab will test whether the potential new entry has a field value that matches an existing entry.

For example, an RSS feed often has a guid field that uniquely identifies a feed element, or a store product usually has a stock id number.

If you save this value into a custom field, you can then, on subsequent imports, check this field for an existing entry and update it or ignore it as appropriate.

You can use the Use this field to check for duplicates setting to select which field to check. If you leave this field blank it will always add a new entry.

if you check the Update existing entries option then DataGrab will attempt to update the entry’s values from the new record. Otherwise, it will ignore it (ie, not update it, but not add a new entry).

Add a timestamp to this field

DataGrab can add a timestamp to a field that it adds or updates. This can help in tracking which entries have been updated or deleting old entries.

Delete old entries

If you check this, DataGrab will delete any entries in the channel that have not been added or updated by this import. This can be useful for maintaining an up-to-date product list, for example, but must be used with care.

Default Author

This allows you to set the author of any new entries.

Author

You can also assign the author from a field in the data source. The Author Field Value tells the system what format the author is stored as (eg, email address, username) and Author specifies which data field it is in.

Status

The Status field allows you to specify a data source field to set the entry’s status or you can use Open, Closed or the channel’s default.

Offset

Sometimes you need to adjust the time to take into account localization. The offset option allows you to add or subtract any number of seconds from the date/time values.

Limit

The number of entries to import in a single request. By default, this is set to 1 to prevent server timeouts when performing large imports. After the limit is reached, DataGrab will refresh the page and start importing the next batch of entries.