Data Loader – Validation Rules by Use Case

Selecting validation rules in the ‘Settings’ step of file mapping can sometimes be tricky. Depending on the fields you are mapping in your source file, there are a number of combinations you can select.

To help guide you through this step, here are a few use-cases based on your incoming mapped fields. Additionally, your Audience Services team is well-versed in these validation rules and can offer insight if necessary.

Name, Email & Address

• Customer Matching-Lookup – Name + Email
• Customer Matching-Lookup – Name + Address
• Exact Email Match
• Fail Too Many Matches (optional, but nice to use in order to prevent the system from ‘guessing’ if it finds multiple email addresses that match exactly)
• Invalid Email Address Format
• Hold Junk Names
• Auto Cleanup
• Vulgarity

Name & Email

• Customer Matching-Lookup – Name + Email
• Exact Email Match
• Fail Too Many Matches (optional, but nice to use in order to prevent the system from ‘guessing’ if it finds multiple email addresses that match exactly)
• Invalid Email Address Format
• Hold Junk Names
• Auto Cleanup
• Vulgarity

Email Only

• Exact Email Match
• Fail Too Many Matches (optional, but nice to use in order to prevent the system from ‘guessing’ if it finds multiple email addresses that match exactly)
• ‘Reject New Customer’ OR ‘Process Non Match as Add’ (depending on what you want to do with the records that didn’t match)
• Invalid Email Address Format
• Vulgarity

External IDs

• Customer Id must already Exist (choose this if you want to match to existing records. Any Id that doesn’t match will be rejected automatically)
• Customer Id Fill Test (optional)
• Incoming Name Matches Existing Customer Id (optional)
• Auto Cleanup
• Invalid Email Address Format (if email address is present in the file)
• Vulgarity
• Hold Junk Names (if name fields are present)

Adding/Rejecting New Records

• Reject New Customer – Use when you don’t want to add any new records to the database. Ideal if you’re trying to match your file and the ‘mismatched’ options should already exist. If no match is found using the selected matching rules the record will be added as new unless the Reject New Customer option is checked.
• Process Non-Match as Add – Use when you want to create new records based on the ‘leftover’ contacts once matching has taken place.

For a full write-up of all available validation rules, check out our ‘Validation Rules‘ article.