7.x-2.x Feeds: Common Issues

Last updated December 4, 2011. Created by johnbarclay on October 6, 2011.
Edited by juampy. Log in to edit this page.

Just spent a couple weeks on projects involving feeds and set aside a couple hours to write this. The main purpose of this page is to thin out the issue queue support requests for Feeds 7.x-2.x and generally help with common feeds problems. Its specific to Drupal 7.x-2.x Feeds and will quickly become out of date as feeds moves through the alpha/beta process. Hope this helps someone.

Current Bugs and Common Gotchas

Issues with mapping multiple values in one field

• Importing multiple files into same field. Not supported. #1116130: How to use Feeds to Import multiple files (file not in a feed). Solution: use hook_feeds_after_parse.
• Delimited fields imported with multiple values. Not supported. See #1039134: Multi Tag import when importing a node , #1231522: Having multiple values in a CVS imported into one target value. . Solution: Use feeds_tamper with the explode function for fields that accept arrays for values (taxonomy, node reference, user reference, etc.).

Issues with importing files and images

• paths with bad characters or spaces fields break import #686470: Filefield mapper: URLs with spaces not parsed properly. Solution: patches in thread or use feeds_tamper with regex or html entity decode
• When files fail to download, import fails. See #1110762: Feeds does not catch file exceptions properly in file mapper and FeedsParser.inc getFile() function. Solution. Apply patch or fix all paths in your import.
• Empty file paths break feed. See #1110762: Feeds does not catch file exceptions properly in file mapper and FeedsParser.inc getFile() function. Solution. Apply patch or fix all paths in your
• #1080386: How to get title and alt fields into your image import for drupal 7 feeds

Issues with character encoding and empty fields

• #1107522: Expected behavior when importing empty/blank values.. Solution: apply patch.
• Check that fields are truly empty and don't have spaces in them. If they have spaces fix the feed or use the trim function in feeds_tamper for those fields
• SQLSTATE[HY000]: General error: 1366. This is a character encoding issue. Solution: make sure your feeds are utf8 encoded. Make sure your db is utf8 encoded. See #1140194: SQLSTATE[HY000]: General error: 1366 Incorrect string value for a field with accents , #1156982: SQLSTATE[HY000]: General error: 1366 Incorrect integer value: '' for column 'xxxx' at row 1
• Not having default values for required fields. Solution: have default values for required fields

Entity/Node Identity Issues. GUIDs, Node ids, inserts when updates expected, etc.

• Feeds creates new items instead of updating existing ones
• Importing new nodes with node ids fails. This is a bug where feeds node processor assumes anything with a mapped nid is an update rather than an insert. #1046916: Importing nodes with their original NID fails because of ambiguity in node_save() in FeedsNodeProcessor .
• Multiple feeds directed at same content type...each feed creating own entities/nodes: #1127696: Attach multiple importers to one content type (in D7)
• Multiple feeds directed at same content type...each feed sharing/updating same nodes

Special Field Types

Generally the code and issues for other field types are in that module. For example node reference and user reference field issues will be in the references module. Fields built into core will be in the feeds module.

• node reference. Will not work until patch #988856: Feeds mapper for node_reference and user_reference fields is applied. Comment #84 is best as of 10/6/2011. To use multiple node references in a delimited entry, use feeds_tamper explode.
• node reference integrity violation errors. make sure in the node reference field, correct node types are allowed
• user reference. I believe this is the same as node reference, but have not used it.
• Link Mapper Link mapper has a number of issues:
  #1181092: Link Mapper field name problem - Title overwrites url
  #1165354: Link Mapper does not handle multiple links
  #1182462: Link mapper does not set a real_target
  #1298258: Link Field Mapper Field Name Bug
  #1345570: Link url mapping not working
• Body and Body Summary / Teaser split: #1329626: Auto generate body_summary for node on import?

Taxonomy

• Hierarchical taxonomies. These are not supported. Solution: #1152940: Feeds term import with hierarchy and weight
• Numeric Taxonomy Term import fails. Padding with spaces sems to work ( #1283628: Numerical terms not being imported as Taxonomy Terms) and another approach is #1019688: Split taxonomy mapper in two variants: term name +tid (avoids mapping error for Numeric taxonomy term, too). Needs same patch as hierarchical taxonomies patch.

Debugging Techniques

See Readme.txt

Common Tricks

• http://drupal.org/project/feeds_tamper. Use this to alter data before it is imported. Has trim(), regex, join, explode, html decode, etc. functionality.
• Rerunning feed when no data has changed. Feeds will not reimport data if the hash of the item and the feed configuration have not changed. To fix this, change the name or description of your importer. See also #1296846: Re-run import with no changes