CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Being able to assign a unique membership number to each new member is absolutely essential to our needs.

There is a unique number field for each contact which is called "Internal Contact ID". It is searchable, it can be imported, and it can be assigned to a profile. It is in many of the MySQL tables that CiviCRM uses and it is a primary key, auto increment, unsigned integer. It other words it is auto generated each time a new contact is entered. But I have not worked out how to use it. I can create a profile and include it as a field but I can't work out how to view my contacts using this profile (this part does not seem to be in the online manual).

Another problem is that our members already have membership numbers. It seems that Internal Contact IDs must exist first before import data can be mapped to them. I think I can import these numbers by first creating a set of dummy contacts (around 5000 or so) and then updating these on a second import, this time mapping the membership numbers to the Internal Contact IDs. Unless there is an easier way to do this.

The main thing I would like to know at this stage is how to display the Internal Contact ID.

Our org has not as yet given any membership numbers. Although we have collected memberships.

So for us it would be more useful to have the internal id as a membership no. or some other custom field that is auto generated from within civi for each new member/contact.

one problem I see with using the internal id is that it is assigned to every contact not just members. If that profile is visible on all contacts then it would appear like every contact has a membership number which would be confusing.

So, for us, it would be preferable if the membership number was generated at the time of creating a membership only.

If the id that is auto generated could also be edited then that could cater for orgs that already have membership numbers.

Generating an incremental receipt number for monetary contributions is another matter.

I think you can force the 'next' autoincrement value to be a specific value using a SQL statement. You might want to check the MySQL documentation for how to do this (and assuming you find the solution - report it back for others here).

A way to generate membership numbers automatically would be an important improvement to civiCRM in my view.  I can scarcely think of an org I've been involved in that has not assigned me some sort of member number, so, as I've been setting up civiCRM for my org, I've been surprised not to find any feature that addresses auto-assigned member numbers.  However, in my org, all contacts are members, so I was thinking of using the internal ID for member numbers.  To this end, I need to have the internal ID displayed in a profile.  Here's the problem:

I created a profile with the Internal ID field as one of the viewable/searchable items.  When I do a search from the front end, I see the data for all of the fields in the profile such as name, last name, email, and Internal ID (renamed member number) in the listings; however, when I click 'view' next to a listing, and see the profile view, the Internal ID data is conspicuously absent though the label is there.  All other fields except Internal ID (member number) display properly in the profile view.

Does anyone know why this is happening and how to fix it?

Yes, I did reproduce the problem in the sandbox using a profile with only the Internal ID field: it showed up in the listings but not in the profile view. Result:
(http://www3.telus.net/andersonanimal/civiIssue.PNG)

I will file an issue.

((--issue filed as CRM-3962--))

Other than the fix below to allow you to display each contact's "contact ID" - there's no new out-of-the-box solution for this. You might want to check that out first and see if it's enough. The "internal contact ID" is displayed at the bottom of each contact summary page and can be included in profile "view".

Oh - each membership record (a contact may have one or more memberships) also has a unique ID. This # isn't currently displayed on membership screens but could be added to the templates quite easily (since the variable value is already assigned).

If these approaches doesn't work for you, there are potentially a number of tools in 2.2 which could be used  - depending on where you need - but they would require some additional relatively simple programming using a "hook". A PHP-calculated custom field added to the membership record is one idea. Let us know if you want to pursue something like that.

This would be so very useful to us, particularly if it could be done based on search results or tag or something else that indicates 'only these contacts'. How do I follow it up and what skill does the person from my org need to have to do the simple programming? (You can already tell it's not me!)

Can you explain your requirements a bit more - not sure what "it could be done based on seach results..." means? Do you only want to assign membership numbers to certain members? If so, why? Actually, I'd recommend starting a new post with detailed description of what you're currently doing and what you need in this area (inputs and outputs :-) ).