CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

My organization is using CiviCRM Activities to track the activities of subcontractors.  We have the subcontractors enter their activities into a simple spreadsheet, then later import that spreadsheet as Activities.

This spreadsheet import solution has been working well for contractor activities which refer to a specific member - for example, "Import Data (row 3)" in the attached screenshot.  However, I run into problems trying to import what I call "self-referring activities", stuff a contractor does which cannot be referenced to a single member - "row 2" in the attached screenshot, where the matching CiviCRM field "Email (match to contact)" would be left blank.  When I attempt to import a self-referring activity, the import fails with error "No matching Contact found for ( )".  How can I import activities without matching Contact records?

I know the self-referring activity case is valid, as Civi automatically creates just these kind of self-referring activities automatically for actions such as sending an email.  If I use phpmyadmin to look at the tables, it appears that an activity referenced to a specific member creates a row in civicrm_activity_target; a self-referring activity does not create a row in this table.

So, my questions:
1) is the capability to import self-referring activities already present in Civi, but I'm just not going about it correctly?
2) if this capability is *not* already present in Civi, how do I add it?
2a) I suppose the answer to #2 is "modify XX file" - but which file(s), and how should it/they be modified?

Thanks Lobo.

Since I know very little PHP, I lack the skills to implement what you suggest. However, I did do a little sleuthing before stalling out and learned a couple things which might speed up the process for others who may someday find this thread and attempt it themselves. 

(a) the "No matching contact..." error originated from the "import" function in civicrm/CRM/Activity/Import/Parser/Activity.php
(b) the errors are thrown by function "civicrm_check_contact_dedupe", which is in civicrm/api/v2/utils.php

That's about where I stalled out.

As an alternative, I decided to create a new Individual contact and assign all self-referring activities to that contact.  Meaning, the activity is now "added by" a contractor and "with contact" is mapped to the new contact record I created.  Now that new contact's activity log will contain all actions by contractors which are not attributable to a real person.

Thanks again!