International characters in a CSV Source connection

When syncing a CSV Source file into Active Directory (AD), you will see that international characters are not synced properly. The following solution is recommended to work around this problem.

There are two caveats for using this solution:

• Because of these international characters, your input file MUST be saved in UTF-8 format.
• Then, because UTF-8 format files contain an encoded character set before the first line of text, you’ll need to remove your column headers and leave a blank line instead (which we can then ignore).

To proceed:

1. Save a backup copy of import.txt
2. Open your import.txt file in Notepad.
3. Delete the column header line (So, the first line is blank, the second line begins the first line of client data.)
4. Click File > Save As. Then at the bottom, select Encoding type of “UTF-8” (You will be prompted to confirm Replace of the existing file, click Yes.)
5. Close the import.txt file
6. On the Connection configurations Source tab: uncheck the box that reads Enable Column Headers.
7. In the Sample Data you will see that the Column Headers now show up as Field0, Field1, Field2, etc., and the first line of data (the blank line) shows some gibberish characters in the first column. Don’t worry about this: the Discovery phase will simply log that line as “No Source Index”.
8. On the Source tab, change your Field Definitions to use the headers shown in the sample data (Field0, Field1 etc) instead of the old column header names.
9. If using custom mapping, change your custom mappings to use Field0, Field1, etc (instead of the old column header names).

Now, when you run your Sync, all attributes containing the special international characters should appear correctly in AD.