Importing from Canny

You can move a Canny workspace into nolby in one go, and nothing is written until you have seen exactly what would land.

There are two ways in, and which one you have decides what can come across.

An export, or an API key

An export is a CSV Canny writes from a board's ⋯ menu, under Export posts. Anyone can produce one, on any Canny plan. It carries your posts — their titles, their detail, their status, their category and who wrote them.

It also carries each post's vote total, and that total comes across: a post with 276 votes in Canny arrives here with 276, so your board sorts by demand from the first minute. What a CSV cannot carry is who those people were:

• Voters. The file records a score, not the people behind it. Canny exports voter lists one file per post, which is not an import path for a board with 400 of them. The consequence is worth knowing — nobody counted in a carried total can be emailed when the thing they wanted ships, and a post's voter list will be shorter than its number until people vote here.
• Comments. The file records how many, not what they said, and a count with nothing behind it is worse than none — so comment counts are not carried. Comment export is a Business-plan feature at Canny.
• Email addresses. No column carries one, so an author arrives as a name.

An API key has none of those limits. It brings the votes attached to the people who cast them, the comments attached to the posts they were left on, and the addresses of everyone involved — so those voters can be told when their idea ships. Your key is in your Canny company settings. API access needs a paid Canny plan.

You will see both options on Import, and the preview names anything the door you chose cannot carry, before you commit to it.

What happens

1. You hand over a file or a key. We read your workspace and stage everything we found. Nothing has been written to your boards yet.
2. You get a preview. How many boards, posts, votes, comments and authors would land — and what would not, counted and named. If your export covers more than one board you can untick the ones you do not want, and the counts change with you.
3. You press the button. Only then does anything get written.
4. It runs in the background. You can close the tab. A large workspace is applied in batches and picks up where it left off.

Things worth knowing before you start

Boards from a file arrive private. An export does not record who could see a board, and we would rather not publish something that was closed. Make each one public when you have looked at it. Boards imported through the API keep the setting they had in Canny.

Statuses are matched by name. If your Canny workspace says Planned and so does yours here, you get one status, not two. A status we do not recognise is created and left off the roadmap for you to place.

Internal comments stay internal. Anything Canny had hidden from your end-users stays hidden here, and never appears on a public board.

Nobody is emailed. Importing four hundred posts is a migration, not four hundred things happening. No webhook fires and no notification is sent, so the people on your old board hear from you when you are ready rather than the moment you press the button.

Imported addresses are not treated as confirmed. We hold the address, but nobody has proved to us that it belongs to that person — so we will not email it. When an imported voter signs in to your board, their address is confirmed and they start getting the updates they voted for.

Importing twice

Running the same import again is safe. We remember what each Canny row became, so a second import lands on the same boards and posts rather than making a second copy of everything. That is the normal case: import, keep working in Canny for a week while you settle in, import again.

If something goes wrong

You will get a sentence saying what, not a stack trace. The common ones:

• "That file is not a .csv." Canny exports posts as a CSV. If you have a different file, an API key is the better route anyway.
• "That export is larger than 4MB." Use an API key — it has no size to exceed.
• "We could not read that as a Canny export." Check it is the posts export rather than another file Canny can produce.
• "Canny did not accept that API key." The key is in your Canny company settings, and API access needs a paid Canny plan there.

If an import stops part-way, whatever had already landed stays where it is, and the screen tells you how much that was. Nothing is half-written: each batch is applied in one piece or not at all.

Still stuck? Email support@nolby.co and we will move it across for you.