CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

We tend to use the id from the civicrm_member table. It's fairly simple to write a bit of module to make this available to e-mails & letters you send out (I have done tokens like this for pledges & 'last 5 contributions' but not members at this stage)

So, the existing member numbers? What are they? Where are they from?

I was in the same boat when I first deployed CiviCRM for our organization. I spent some time trying to write a bit of custom code to handle it, and ended up just giving up and using the contact id as the member number.

My final solution was ugly, but worked....

• Import the data from our old member database using the CiviCRM contact import function
• Modify the database schema constraints to allow updating the contact id and to propagate those changes to all tables (I probably still have the SQL for this)
• Write/run a script that would update the contact id to be the same as the member number in our old system

Since the contact id is an auto incrementing field, the next user created will have a contact id greater than the highest member number in our old system.

Another option is to import old membership numbers into the external_identifier field & use smarty templates like

{if 'external_identifier'}
{external_identifier}
{else}
{$contactID}
{/if}

(note all syntax off the top of my head - so probably wrong)