CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi -

I have a client who has imported a bunch of junk into the contact tables and there are tons of duplicates. I have written some php in a Drupal module that pulls up the duplicates based on having the same email and then this gives the option to merge them in civi.

I also have the need to create  a process which deletes the contact records, but I don't want to leave related records in other tables (ie. groups, address... etc). Can someone quickly explain an easy way to do this? In other words would it be best to simply delete from each table contact_id = '123' for example and then delete the contact record?

And if that works, which I have no reason to doubt, is there a list of which tables in civi might contain the contact_id as a foreign key?

If there is a function or method in the api that already does this please let me know - otherwise I can do this using PHP/MySQL.

Thanks

If you set

$params['skip_undelete'] => 1;

then it will bypass the trash