How to import a contact with a relationship to another contact?

Question

I'm importing data from another system to Dynamics CRM.

My source data is a table of people, some of whom have a one way relationship to another person. This is represented by a field in the table that contains the id of the other person.

I want to import these people into CRM as contacts, with a relationship to the other contact.

However, I don't think this will work because when a contact is imported the other person might not have been imported yet and so my calculated column lookup won't necessarily find the id of the other contact.

Can you think of a way to make this work?

(I am using Simego Data Synchronisation Studio for this. http://www.simego.com/Solutions/CRM-Integration)

Answer 1

Can you set the tool to do an import and then an update? The first time through, don't load the relationship fields at all, just load all of the contacts. The second pass through, you shouldn't be creating any contact, just setting this relationship field.