CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

We've been looking at the matching process that matches new Drupal users up to a Contact record in CiviCRM.

We were hoping to be able to match on a criteria other than email address, but this seems to be quite hard coded into CiviCRM (in the UFMatch synchronize functions).

In our situation our Drupal users will have a unique ID as a username, created through single sign on. Ie: 1001. We would then like to match these new Drupal users up to their CiviCRM record, where their unique ID will be recorded as a custom field on their record:

Drupal user ID: 1001 --> matches --> Contact custom field, unique ID: 1001

It doesn't look like this would be easy to achieve at present, since matching by email address is hard coded in?

Does anyone have any suggestions about the best way to achieve this? Perhaps we could turn off the automatic matching of new Drupal users to CiviCRM records, and match them up using a custom Rule instead? If so, is there a way to disable the automatic matching?

Hi petendz, thanks for the useful response.

We were originally working with the solution you suggest (even using blog post as a reference, thank you!). But we are also looking at possible alternatives, seeing if there were other ways of tackling the issue that might prove better (that is, better for our use case).

We have quite a large constituent base (200,000+), and I would be nervous about adding this many Drupal users to our system, especially since the vast majority of them will sit being completely unused. In this case it doesn't seem like the tidiest approach to create Drupal users for all of them. But maybe there is a tidier approach we could use that only tags Contacts that want to be active online members, and then creates their Drupal account using the approach you suggest.

Thanks again, we'll keep investigating.

It might be a nice improvement to CiviCRM to make the account matching process more configurable anyway, though I'm sure it works perfectly well for the vast majority of users.