CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Not that my vote counts for anything but I'd like this.

Now the issue comes just how to implement such a thing.  You can't just simple switch the contact type and it doesn't seem quite right to delete the HH name (if switching from HH to ind) and then making the user enter the first and last names. One could try to parse what's in hh name and stick parts of it in first and last names.  Of course, the parse would have to be different depending on how the HH name is entered (i.e. Last, First or First Last). 

Switching from Ind to HH is probably easier. Just concatenate Prefix, first, middle, last, suffix and stick that in HH name and then delete pre, first, middle, etc.  Of course, once again depending on how people enter their hh names the results may be wrong, but it's not that much work to manually switch it afterwords.

There is the matter of greetings was well but one would hope they would be right in the first place, a note that says to check these after a switch is done would be nice.

I wonder if sort_name would take care of itself or if it would need to be dealt with as well.

Another approach might be to change the type and then expose the fields not normally exposed, e.g. HH name for ind, if that field is not null and let the user move the names around as appropriate.  Then give an error if they don't delete the data in the fields that should be null for that contact_type upon saving.

All of this is much easier said then coded, tested, etc...

All of this is much easier said then coded, tested, etc...

Just to re-iterate, the key part missing here is someone willing to do the work / find the funding since otherwise we unfortunately don't have the resources to implement all the feature requests we get.

Thank you Sean! I just used this on 4.5.3 to merge an organization with an individual. It works.

One of my members accidentally made her membership renewal contribution "On behalf of an organization" and in the process created a new organization record. Since hers was not an organizational membership, I had to find a way to associate that contribution and membership with her rather than the non-existent organization. Soft credit was not going to cut it.

Interestingly, once the merge was complete, her record showed the Organization as her Employer. Clicking on the name of the organization led right back to her record. I was able to edit and remove it without a problem.

Since others have said this does not work, I wonder why it worked for me. Perhaps because she had a permissioned relationship with the organization? Or just a relationship? More testing needed. If it doesn't work for you at first, try creating a relationship between the contacts. They try making that a permissioned relationship.

Perhaps all that's needed is an interface that allows us to simply enter two ID numbers to merge the contacts, regardless of type. This could be added at the bottom of the "Find and Merge Duplicate contacts screen." If I knew how to program, I would do it.

Anyway, as always, thanks to everyone who works on CiviCRM and contributes to these forums to help us users.