Solspace Importer - How to update playa field without overwriting

Question

I'm trying to update lots of parent entries in channel with new zoo visitor members using Importer.

I've finally worked out how to import the members using Solspace Importer, then used Datagrab to populate the Zoo visitor channel and create the entries.

Now I want to use Importer to link them to the correct Playa parent categories. However, I can't seem to do this without overwriting (and hence erasing) the original playa field content...

So basically what's happening is any new entry (member) I try and add to the parent channel entry, just overwrites all the existing members that are children of that entry. I just want to add them to the parent as another child entry as opposed to overwrite the whole lot.

How can I go about doing this?

Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks

Answer 1

This is unfortunately not possible. Playa remains a single field, and Importer can either add new data to the field for new entries, or update the field when updating pre-existing entries.

When updating one field, it's an all-or-nothing update: for example if you had an input field with "foo", and you provide "bar" in an import to update the field, the field will now contain "bar", not "foobar". The same thing happens with a Playa field. You would need to provide the old ("up-to-now") data along with your new data, and update the field with all of that data. (With the "foobar" example, you would need to provide "foobar")