Author Topic: Deleting trashed contacts with API call (Read 1448 times)

andersiversen · September 23, 2012, 07:49:24 pm

Hi

I've deleted several thousand contacts on purpose with an API call.
To find the contacts I used this:
$results=civicrm_api("Contact","get", array ('version' => 3,'sequential' =>'1', 'contact_sub_type' =>'student', 'return.id' => 1, 'rowCount' => '39000'));

To delete them I ran the $results array through a foreach loop where I deleted them with:

$result_delete = civicrm_api("Contact", "delete", array ( 'version' => 3, 'sequential' =>'1', 'id' => $id ) );

It worked good and was much faster than I thought - I had to run the script a couple of times though (?).

Anyways I now discover that contact delete used as above put's the contacts in the trash. So now I have 39000 contacts in trash that I want to delete permanently with an API call.

How do I do that? Using 'contact_is_deleted' => 1 to find them and 'skip_undelete' => 1 in the delete call doesn't work for me. Somebody mentions a 'showAll' parameter for some versions back - doesn't work for me either.

All help apreciated

Erik Hommel · September 24, 2012, 12:11:31 am

can you try this:

Code: [Select]

$results=civicrm_api("Contact","get", array (version => '3','sequential' =>'1', 'contact_is_deleted' =>'1'));for deleted ones?

andersiversen · September 24, 2012, 12:02:21 pm

It doesn't work for me:
$results=civicrm_api("Contact","get", array ('version' => '3','sequential' =>'1', 'contact_is_deleted' => '1', 'rowCount' => '39000'));
or
$results=civicrm_api("Contact","get", array ('version' => '3','sequential' =>'1', 'contact_is_deleted' => '1'));
or
$results=civicrm_api("Contact","get", array ('version' => '3','sequential' =>'1', 'contact_is_deleted' => 1));

They all return all my non-deleted contacts.
Even in the API
/civicrm/ajax/rest?json=1&debug=1&version=3&entity=Contact&action=get&contact_is_deleted=1
it returns all the non-deleted contacts. For fun I tryed contact_is_deleted=0 - that at least does as expected - anyways it seems like that parameter is ignored.

andyw · November 15, 2012, 09:41:24 am

Hi there,

I was having the same problem and came across this post - I know it's a couple of months old, but thought I'd add what I'd found, in case it helps anyone.

Not sure if you're using drush to do this at all, but if you are, it's probably failing on permissions.

It won't produce a helpful error message unfortunately - it'll just say 'Could not delete contact' in the api response, but the problem is drush runs, by default, as an anonymous user, which doesn't have permission to delete contacts.

Have tried adding --user=1 to the drush call, but that didn't seem to work either - so I've gone and patched the BAO function for deleting contacts for now so that it skips the permissions check when being called from drush.

Hope that's information someone might find useful, or if someone knows a better way to get round this, please let me know what that is.

Andy

Chris Burgess · January 15, 2014, 02:22:55 pm

To directly delete a contact (no trash), use the 'skip_undelete' API param for your Contact delete call.

https://github.com/civicrm/civicrm-core/blob/master/api/v3/Contact.php#L247

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Author Topic: Deleting trashed contacts with API call (Read 1448 times)

andersiversen

Deleting trashed contacts with API call

Erik Hommel

Re: Deleting trashed contacts with API call

andersiversen

Re: Deleting trashed contacts with API call

andyw

Re: Deleting trashed contacts with API call

Chris Burgess

Re: Deleting trashed contacts with API call