CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi all,
since I'm completely new to civicrm I'm not in a position to judge whether civicrm is the right tool to use.
One of the requirements which have to be facilitated is the fact, that the data for the contacts will be stemming
from 3 different databases and the data therein will partially be disjunct and partially overlapping, so it will
require some additional processing.
Another requirement that has to be covered is the processing of donations in order to provide a confirmation
for the donors: that data stems to a great extent from a banking software. The data would have to be imported
from csv files and needs some processing in order to match donations and contacts.
It's also intended to send out newsletters with a fancy design.

So if anybody can provide any feedback on the suitibility of civicrm for the afore mentioned requirements -
that would be highly appreciated.

Thanks a lot,
wosi

hi wosi,

is this for the import or are you talking about synchronizing with 3 databases on a daily basis?

the data for the contacts will be stemming
from 3 different databases

Wosi,
 if this happens on a daily basis you would have to build a synchronization based on hooks and API. This is quite feasible, I have done something like this for a customer. But it will require some customizations, and you would need to be or get familiar with the concepts of customizing CiviCRM. Is this something you would want to undertake?

Hi Wosi,

thanks for the hint about the developer guide. That is something I can not change either, but I will drop it in relevant places 

Lots of hints, and I will be happy to give you help when you need it (assuming I know the answers)....find me on the CiviCRM IRC as erik_h or ErikHommel.
Speaking in general terms, what I have done for my synochronization:

• developed a specific wrapper around the standard civicrm API with customer specific data manipulation and validation. At the time I was using v2 of the API, the latest and greatest is far better for these needs
• in the source Oracle database, database triggers where used to trigger REST calls to the specific API wrapper

[li]I used the pre and postProcess hooks to establish if relevant data was changed on the Civi side .... but from your description I gather the data is only fed to CiviCRM, not back to the source. Is that correct?
[/li][/list]

Check the API section in the developer guide and check the API explorer (see this blogpost http://civicrm.org/blogs/eileen/api-documentation-state-api).