Sometimes when importing data into Business Central, you need to make sure that related tables have the correct corresponding records. BCCL can create a stub record in related tables.

A stub record is an almost empty record with only the primary key filled out.

In the following example, we’ll create Customer Posting Groups while importing customers.

Here’s a CSV file with three customers, the forth column is the Customer Posting Group:

Number,Name,ZIP,PostGroup
"4000","The First Customer","92020","GRP1"
"4050","The Seconds Customer","92030","GRP1"
"5040","And another Customer","92080","GRP2"

In the BCCL mapping file, we can set CreateRelatedSub to true to have BCCL create

    {
      "FieldNo": 21,
      "FieldName": "Post Code",
      "MappedName": "PostGroup",
      "Validate": "true",
      "CreateRelatedStub": true
    }

Calling BCCL will insert three customers and create two stub records in the customer posting group table.

❯bccl -t putdata -s table=18 -i customers.csv -m mapping.json
{
  "Table": 18,
  "Inserted": 3,
  "Modified": 0,
  "StubRecords": [
    {
      "Table": 92,
      "Inserted": 2
    }
  ]
}

And a quick check in the customer posting group shows two new record stubs.