Environment Imports Import Exact State of Item Categories Present in Artifact

Currently, Environment Import functionality maintains the categories of existing items and adds additional categories which are present in the artifact that you are importing. If you use the environment import functionality for environment migrations between non-prod and prod, this can cause items to be in more categories than they are expected to be.

As an example, if in non-prod, an item is in category A, and then you import it into prod, this item is as expected in category A. If you then, in non-prod, move the item from category A to category B, then import this new artifact into prod, the item will be in both category A and B in prod.

We propose that when building environment export artifacts, items which are to be updated by environment imports can be selected to be updated in place. Then, when importing, these items are imported in place, so any data not present in the imported artifact will not be maintained. This means that categories which have been removed from an item should be propagated, as would any data attached to secondary specs relating to that category. The existing functionality should still exist for customers who rely on it.

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Nov 20, 2025

One example use case: when using secondary specs that are associated with categories in a design where a record should only have a single secondary spec, the current behavior would result in production records being in both categories and having two secondary specs, despite only ever having one spec when testing the data before it goes live.
From our perspective, the proposed behavior should be the default, and would be perfectly happen with that change. However, since that might negatively impact other customers, it seems better to add a flag, similar to the CREATE vs CREATE_OR_UPDATE flags already present in the Import/Export tool, which specifies whether to use the current behavior or our proposed behavior. This would need to be a new column in the CSV containing the records in the import zip.

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Environment Imports Import Exact State of Item Categories Present in Artifact