CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi,

I had this very same issue recently. I then realised (after much looking around) that the matching fields on import are defined by the 'find and merge duplicate contacts' strict rules (found in the 'search' menu) one is set for each of the contact type you are importing (household, individual, org).

If you create some new rules where the external identifier is the only field and its weight is the same as the total to trigger the rule then when you set this strict rule as default and you import that contact type you'll see that the 'External Identifier' label will have '(match to contact)' after it. This will then match imports on this field to your pre-existing external IDs in the database.

Remeber to set your strict matching rules back to what they should be for human input after the imports though!

Hope that helps and is what you were looking for.

Cheers,

Dave

Dave,

The matching rules you suggest are already in place, though I believe you may be onto something with the weight. Currently i see the match to contact for external identifier field at step of 2 of the civimember import wizard but for some reason it's just not importing the record, it skips it. the import error message that the file spits reads : No matching Contact found for ([contact last name] AND [member id])