CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I am implementing CiviCRM and am importing data from an ancient MIS system. The MIS system has a member number for each contact. This member number is known to the members and extensively used by them, including being printed on their membership card. We would therefore like to keep these member numbers when we move to CiviCRM as they are so weel used and known by our members.

I can import the member number into a custom field and have this working fine. I am doing the contact import using the API as all the data is known and I have no problem with duplicates since the member number is unique. However what we would much prefer to do is to use the existing member number as the CiviCRM contact id. That way it would be the primary key and we would not have to search for members by member number. This would a much cleaner and more efficient method.

However neither the contact add nor the contact update API allow the contact_id to be set or changed. Is there some way we can achieve this?

It seems to me that there must be many others who are the same position of importing contacts that already have a unique identifier.

Thanks . . . Murray

Hi,

You can't set the value of an autoincrement field (at the db level), so you can't set the internal id.

What I did for a customer was to be sure the internal contact id was > than their last membership number, create a membership number (not sure anymore if it was a custom field or external identifier), and then create a hook so every time they create a new membership, it sets this membership number to the contact_id number.

X+

Thanks very much for the prompt and helpful reply. Great for a newbie like me.

I missed the external id field so will try this as it sounds like what I need.