Contact ID during Participant import

[jimurl]

There must be something basic I am missing. I am importing participants to existing events. The contacts already exist in the database, I just want to add them as participants to the events.

I have a column of Contact IDs in the import file, but which Matching Civicrm field is that supposed to be mapped to? The closest one I see is Participant ID; but that appears to be the unique ID in the participants table, not the same as the contact id. When I try to match the participant ID field to Contact ID, it says there are no matching contacts found:
"Matching Participant record not found for Participant ID 13777. Row was skipped."

Makes sense- the participant record doesn't exist yet, I am trying to create it.
 

[jimurl]

There was something basic I was missing.
From Events->Import Participants one gets a screen to import Participant Records (you can't import contacts from here, they need to already be in the system). In the "On Duplicate Entries", one has the choice to 'skip' ort 'update' , and I was choosing 'Update' which was wrong. I was thinking in terms of updating the contact record, but this refers to updating the Participant Record. So on the "Match fields" page, very next page, I got only an option to deduplicate agains "participant ID".

When I left that option at "Skip", then the Match Fields page gives me the option to dedupe on the basis of "Contact ID."

I hope that helps some one else.

[petednz]

ah - never realised that - so if you are wanting to add Participant Records, use SKIP, so you can create new ones, if you want to update Participant records, use Update but that won't let you create new ones.
Sounds really obvious now but not sure I had spotted it and had previously been around the a loop of
- create contacts
- add those contacts to the Event
- export the Participant ID (via an export from Find Participants)
- match up on the spreadsheet
- import

Do you think the documentation on the Import Participants could be made clearer?

[kza]

I just spent the last few hours trying to figure out what I was doing wrong. I was running into the same problem. Yes, I think it would be very helpful to update the instructions to reflect this logic. Thanks!

FYI - the book and the wiki seems to have different information regarding the required fields when importing participants.