CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Dear Forum:

When trying to import contributions I can see that "Contact ID" is mandatory for matching to profile.  However we have plenty of good fields for matching: external identifier, email address, last name and first name.  We can use all 4 of those and pretty much avoid duplicates.

The problem is I can't see where to make the Contact ID not mandatory?   Of course we will have imported the contacts first, but the Contact ID is not, nor ever, will be in the external Blackbaud fundraising database from which we import the contribution data.

How do I match just of the 4 fields that we have?

I looked at the DeDupe rules but didn't see one that specified Contact ID, so the import rules must be somewhere else?

Thanks in advance.

Thanks for your reply. 

I did indeed try that and got this error:

DB Error: constraint violation
DB Error: constraint violation
DB Error: constraint violation
DB Error: constraint violation

No records imported.

I'm assuming that the contact ID is the issue here?  However, there's no mention as to what the constraint violation is.

** I know that it's aware when a contact doesn't exist because I saw those errors listed separately.  And because I'm only importing small test batches of contacts and contribs to work out the kinks, most but not all donors are going to be in the system, but since ALL records got rejected, I think it's the Contact ID.

Yes, that is something *I* can do, but my absolute goal, without doubt, is to obsolete myself and to define import process workflows that are manageable by time-constrained  non-techies.  Thanks though.

But that does remind me that my import mappings don't seem to be saving!  If anyone has a cure for that it'll also help.