CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I am working with a website that has a legacy database where a large percentage of the contacts have not provided email addresses.  We plan to initiate a snail-mail campaign to those contacts to encourage them to submit their email addresses.  I am trying to figure out the simplest way to allow the user to update their contact record online. 

Each contact record has a unique external identifier (member number) that has been imported into the CiviCRM database.   What I would like to do is

• display a form to the user with member number, last name and email fields,
• check for a matching record based on the member number and last name
• if a match is found, insert the submitted email address into the matched contact record

I was hoping to do this via a CiviCRM profile form, and then use a form hook to check for matches and update the email info, but don't think that will work because:

• the profile would have to be public (since we do not yet know the contact) and I don't want to expose any of the field data to the public
• even if I was able to properly update the matching record with the new email, I don't think there is a way to prevent CiviCRM from creating a new contact record (I guess there may be a way of automatically deleting the unnecessary contact record after it has been created but this seems clumsy

I am therefore assuming that the only way to do this is to create a non-Civicrm page that performs the above match check/email insert process using API's.  Since someone may have done this before, I would appreciate any input or advice.