Importing Delimited-Text Data
What's Your Delimiter?
If possible, create your delimited-text files using tabs as the delimiter. The tab makes a better delimiter than the comma, because a comma can occur as a character within an input field, for example, "1600 SW Wall Street, Suite 400". This will cause the software to see an extra field in that record.
If the comma is your delimiter, check whether any records have commas within the values themselves (as in above example ). If so, do one of the following.
- Recreate your delimited text file using tab delimiters.
- Put quote characters around the fields (or at least around the fields that contain commas).
Note: If you’re using a comma-delimited (.csv) file, be sure to remove any "carriage return” (line break) characters within individual fields. (These can result from saving the file from within a spreadsheet program that supports line breaks within individual cells.) These characters can corrupt the data when uploaded into Oracle Responsys.
Does File Have Empty Fields?
If some records do not have values for some fields, the delimiter character is still necessary to indicate an empty field.
Field Names Aren't Appearing
In general, you should have field names as the first line of a delimited text file. This isn't a requirement—you can always type in the field names after importing the data—but it's a simpler and more dependable method.
Timestamp Data Lost
Data sources downloaded from Oracle Responsys are saved as comma-separated values, also known as "CSV format." You can modify these CSV files and upload them back into Oracle Responsys for continued use.
If the downloaded data source includes a Timestamp_ column, though, and you want to preserve the information in that column, be sure to rename the column before uploading the modified file back into Oracle Responsys.
Warning: The new column name cannot start with the word "timestamp” (uppercase, lowercase, or mixed)—if it does, Oracle Responsys will overwrite the existing information with the date and time of the upload.
Important: If you edit the downloaded data source in Microsoft® Excel, be sure to apply the following format to any timestamp columns before saving your changes in comma-separated or tab-delimited format: yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss.000 (Note three zeroes at the end.)