CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Why does #civicrm use ucfirst() to require Membership Types be capitalized in v3 Membership API? Haven't found any explanation in docs. Am I missing something?

I set up the membership types in all lower case, imported contacts and memberships, and then the Membership Status Processor (CRM_Member_BAO_Membership::updateAllMembershipStatus()) called the v3 API to update the Memberships with new statuses according to dates, and the API threw errors on all of them because it compares db values against an arbitrarily-capitalized version of the value.

Does anyone know why the API requires Membership Types to begin with capital letters (i.e. why the ucfirst() function is called during create/update of Memberships)?

The function and its immediate caller make sense without the ucfirst() call.

I was wondering whether there might be some requirement for the capitalization in another part of Civi. (However, we'd been using lower-case membership types for a year prior to attempting to use the Membership Status Update function and not noticed any problems.)

We discussed overriding the function but decided against it since it was so deep in the API. Therefore we'll just capitalize our membership types. On a positive note, after capitalizing them, their links to our lower-case Drupal roles were preserved. The Civi - Drupal role synchronization must match using ids rather than names/descriptions.

Thank you for your input. It's encouraging to hear that Civi has been around long enough to have "legacy" code. Be proud.