CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Comrades,
I'd like to write an api which exposes dedupe logic to allow for scripting in extensions.  The "find" and "merge" logic in pretty good shape, the api would just be a simple wrapper around those.  "Diff" is another can o' worms, but I think the logic in CRM_Contact_Form_Merge could be extracted.

These methods could be hung off of the Contact api -- there is already a basic "merge" method there.

So far, the high-level methods I expect we want are:

Find Dupes
This would be run on the entire list of contacts, on a single existing contact, or on contact data before insertion.  A dedupe rule must be specified.

The whole-database case can get tricky, because it's an all-to-all comparison, the effort increases faster than db size.  I'm not sure if we should provide a built-in way to break this into smaller jobs, or if we should leave it for extension authors.

Diff Contacts
Given two existing contacts, return the differences in a format which could be used to generate a form such as Contact_Form_Merge, and can be used as input to the merge function.

Merge Contacts
Transfer all contact belongings.  Options to control whether data like address is overwritten, appended, or ignored.

-Adam