Migrated from a heavily customized Monday.com setup to a new CRM. Used the vendor's standard import tool for boards/items.
Post-migration, all our custom fields (dropdowns, numbers, formulas connecting multiple boards) are gone. Only basic text fields came through. The import log shows success, no errors.
* Vendor support says "unsupported field types are dropped." Not in their pre-sales docs.
* No rollback. The Monday.com instance was decommissioned as per project plan.
Need to rebuild the field logic, but the source data might still be in the import JSON. How do we:
1. Parse the original export to see if custom field data is even there.
2. Map and re-import it via API, assuming the target CRM supports the fields via its schema.
Looking for a script or method to audit the Monday.com JSON export. Example of what I'm dealing with:
```json
{
"board": {
"items": [
{
"name": "Client Project",
"column_values": {
"text_field_1": "On Track",
"custom_dropdown_7": "High Priority",
"formula_9": "ERROR"
}
}
]
}
}
```
The `"formula_9"` shows `"ERROR"` in the export. The dropdown value is present. Need to extract all unique `column_values` keys to see what we can salvage.
-dk
Trust but verify, then don't trust.
Classic. The import tool "successfully" dropped your data because it didn't understand the schema. That "ERROR" in the formula field is your first clue the export was already broken before it left Monday.
You're right to check the source JSON first, but you need the board schema export, not just the items. The column_values keys like "custom_dropdown_7" are useless without the metadata defining what type "7" is. Monday's API can give you that, if you still have API access to the old instance.
If not, you're reverse-engineering from the data dump. The dropdown values might be there, but the formulas are goners - they're calculated live, not stored. Rebuilding that logic is a manual job.
And next time, test the import with a single complex item before decommissioning the source. A vendor's "standard" tool is rarely built for custom work.
The "ERROR" in your formula field is the export basically shrugging its shoulders. It's a calculated value, not stored data, so you won't salvage it from the JSON.
You can parse for the dropdown values, but as user23 implied, those "custom_dropdown_7" keys are meaningless without the board schema. If you don't have API access to the old board to get the column definitions, you're just looking at a list of orphaned strings. This is the standard vendor lock-in play, making the export format useless without their platform to interpret it.
Always amusing when a successful import log is just a list of things they quietly ignored.
Beware of free tiers
Exactly. That "orphaned strings" line hits hard. It's a huge hidden cost in these migrations.
One small hope: if you still have user access to the decommissioned Monday instance, even if it's read-only, you might be able to pull the board schema via the API before it's truly gone. I've seen admins leave a grace period.
Otherwise, yeah, you're manually matching those strings to what you *think* the dropdown was. Brutal way to learn the lesson about schema-first exports 😬
That grace period is real, but it's often just a week or two before the instance is purged. If you're in that window, drop everything and run this GraphQL query via the Monday API to get the board schema. It's the only way to decode those IDs.
I'd also check if your Monday admin took a manual backup of the workspace before decommissioning. Sometimes they export a board as a CSV or snapshot for "just in case," which would have the column headers with types. Without that or the API, you're doing archaeology on the data dump, trying to infer the schema from the pattern of values, which is guesswork at best.
Automate everything. Twice.