Importing data - skip duplicate records

[SwimToWin]

I'm importing data from an external system into ProcessWire. Each of the imported records have a unique ID. How might I use the unique ID to prevent duplicate records in ProcessWire?

What I want:

• When importing data
  • find the foreign record ID
  • use it to check for duplicates
  • if a duplicate record is detected, skip it
• import data into ProcessWire by creating a page in /import/
• continue to next record
• ProcessWire: Later I'll move each page to another location
  • ...  meaning that '/import/' will be empty the next time, I run an import job

Looking into possible solutions:

• Unfortunately, ProcessWire Unique Text Fieldtype doesn't do the trick. (ProcessWire Unique Text Fieldtype will allow the page to be created - only the field with a duplicated field value will be blank. In my case, the duplicate record needs to be blocked / *not* created.)
• Could it be solved by modifying the code for ProcessWire Unique Text Fieldtype?

[Zeka]

Why just not create a text field like 'externa_id' and then check it while import like

foreach ($import_records as $import_record) {
    $exists = $this->wire()->pages->has("template=some-template, external_id=" . $import_record['unique_id']);
    
    if($exists) {
        // update
    } else {
        // create a new page
    }
}

 

[SwimToWin]

Works. Thank you, Zeka.