CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

so i assume your custom fields are extending membership (based on the behavior described below)

u will have to do two imports. First import the contact and then import the membership with membership details and custom data and use the match-to-contact fields in the import

lobo

Try to import them as contact first, be sure they are all them and then import them again, as members, with their membership information.

While importing the members, you can tell to match the existing contacts, so it doesn't recreate them (ideally, you have an external ID and you try to match on that, instead of the first name/last name).

Alternatively, developing a small code to import and use the apis isn't very complicated if you know a bit of PHP.

In the map field step, there are a bunch of fields that you can select as "match to contact". have you tried using the member import and seen the various options there?

lobo

If you select "Insert New Memberships" from Step 1 of Import Members - then on step 2 you should get a few "key" fields as "Match to Contact" options (internal contact id, external contact id) - and the field or fields that are set up in your Strict Individual Duplicate Matching rule (Email address by default).

You can see this on the public demo - Memberships >> Import Members` (http://drupal.demo.civicrm.org/civicrm/member/import&reset=1)

Keep in mind the following:
- Contacts are the base record in CiviCRM. Contacts can have one or more memberships, can make contributions (i.e. they can be donors), can register for events (participants), etc.
- Contact records must exist before you can import new memberships. So in your case you would Import Contacts first (ideally including an external id from your old system which you can then use to link to the contacts when importing membership data for them).
- Then use Import Memberships -> New Memberships to add the membership data

Use "Update Existing Memberships" only if you are importing updated info for existing membership records.

can we get ssh access to your machine. We will need write access to add some debugging code

if so please ping us on IRC

lobo

I had the same issue when importing contacts. Solved the vanishing custom fields by saving them again (going to the definition and submitting without changing). Perhaps that works for you as well.

I am trying to replicate my website to my (Synology) NAS to give you access. I am faced with some slow response issues on the NAS, so this could take me some time.