CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I am running a civicrm system for our seascoutgroup. The goal is to keep track of all current and previous members. The cuurent members are also available in the national scouting database in the Netherlands. I am using a csv file to import the data from this database. All the contacts worked fine but now I am trying to import the membership info. Than I run into the following problem:

1) In the first member import screen I must select: "Insert new memberships" because my csv file of course does not contain the Membership ID's
2) This results in a new equal membership of the same membership type each time I run the import.

Does anybody has some smart idea's how to avoid this?

Thanks for your answer and yes I have a reason. The file I am getting is containing all the active memberships from the group so also the ones I already imported the previous time. To avoid this I should filter the CSV file for only new memberships since the last time I imported. Maybe I can create an Excel script for this but I was hoping for a simpler method.

The external ID maps to a contact whereas the membership id is the membership row - if you only ever have one membership per contact that might be fine.

It does seem like it would be better if you could have some updates & some creates in the same job & seems like a missing feature. We sometimes use an extension (https://github.com/eileenmcnaughton/nz.co.fuzion.csvimport) to import to the UI - I haven't used it on membership - we've mostly used it where there isn't an existing import (events, campaigns option values) - but you might be able to. Not sure if it would make life easier or harder. You would need to git clone or download it from github to your extensions directory,  install it as an extension & then go to the url civicrm/csvimporter/import - which I think is deliberately not published. Then you actually have to type the word 'Membership' (the api you are importing to) & the rest is like a normal import. I'm pretty sure that way you would either have to provide the membership id OR the other required fields