CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I am importing from one Civi database to a new one (worried about data corruption in the first one). The target database has the source database InternalID as the ExternalID for each contact.

However, I need to update all the contacts (some data has changed, some needs filling in) so I want to do a contact import and update on the existing contacts in the target database.

I want to acheive the situation where the import is only using the given ID as the test and will overwrite/fill in regardless of what it there already, without creating duplicates or doing any different duplicate check (which are prone to go wrong, since fathers/sons in the same house share email addresses and are therefore very difficult to de-dupe any other way).

I had thought to do this with a strict de-dupe rule that only tested InternalID (or externalID) but these don't seem to work and duplicates of everyone are created.

Any suggestions, thanks?

Ed - I would expect it to work as you described with External ID. Does the 'rule' work to 'Find Duplicates' when you run it (and you have contacts w/ the same Ext ID?

As another thought, did you already try just using the "External ID (match to contact)" with the default strict rule? Not sure how it will behave if you're also importing Email addresses.

I had thought to do this with a strict de-dupe rule that only tested InternalID (or externalID) but these don't seem to work and duplicates of everyone are created.

Any suggestions, thanks?

My recollection when I experimented with this was that if the foreign key exists then it is matched according to that and you do NOT need to include a rule for foreign key matching in the dedupe rule you select on import.  A similar thing seemed to happen if internal contact id existed.

In fact my recollection is that it worked better if you just used no dedupe rule at all  vs one that included foreign key and/or contact id.

I'm not sure I experimented with this enough to get a total feel for how it actually works, but my impression from that would be, just include a foreign key (or contact id, but preferably NOT BOTH!), DON'T select any de-dupe rule, and see how that works.

Make sure to select "update" duplicate contacts (though you could also experiment with 'no duplicate checking'--again my impression when I was experimenting was the internal contact id or external id would automatically merge the records where those matched, regardless of dedupe rule or settings--though again I could be wrong).