CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi folks. I wonder if anyone has come up against this:
I have a whole pile of old event registrations to import. I'm pretty good with the APIs and writing import scripts, but this one stumped me. Not having used civievent until now, I find the price-set thing difficult to manage. See, these old events were all on a sliding scale, so the amount people paid was pretty random. So I don't want or need price-sets to be associated with these events. I just want to create the old event in CiviCRM, then use my import script to add participants, and record how much they paid. Simple right? And yet, why is this not at all simple?
When I go to create the old event, Civi asks me if it was a paid event. It was, so I say yes. If I said no, then there would be no way to associate contributions with the event, I take it. But now it forces me to add at least one fixed-price option or price set, which there is no reason for me to do in this case, but, not having any choice, I do it - I add a fixed price of $600. Then I try adding my buddy "Joe Tester" to the event. It forces me to choose $600 as the amount he paid, but then immediately after, the civicontribute fieldset gives me a blank textfield where I can enter the actual amount that he paid. That's all I wanted in the first place. So I put in $25.
CiviCRM now glibly reports to me that Joe's event fee was $600 (and only if I click an extra level deep and load the actual contribution record will it tell me that the "actual" amount was $25). That's _not_ useful!
If anyone has any advice for a better approach to this, I'd really love to hear it.