CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I'm trying to import our previous database (exported to csv) to our shiny new CiviCRM install. Our company has been around for a while, and we have a mix of different contact data: physical addresses, email addresses and sometimes even multiple of both.

So far so good, CiviCRM seemed to support that. But when importing, I get the following message in my testing set: "Missing required fields: First Name OR Email Address". This is very well possible, because we have plenty of people in our dataset that we only have a physical address of and only know the last name (combined with academic prefix or gender that makes a proper address).

Ideally, I would like to 'unrequire' both the first name and the email address field.

A workaround was suggested on IRC: add a dummy email address and add the 'do not email' as 1. This is what I did for my test set (using test@test.com), and even multiple similar addresses. However, I still get the same error for the fields without a First Name. If I import them with a dummy First Name and try to remove them later again, that is also disallowed.

Is there a way to change which fields are required? Or alternatively, to work around this problem?

Thanks for your reply. I fiddled a bit more, and found out that part of the problem why the workaround didn't work, is that we have multiple columns of email addresses: Email (main), Email (Alternative), Email (assistent) etc. Obviously, most people only have Email (main). It seems that the import function considers the email to be missing if either of the 'email' fields are empty (if correct, you should be able to replicate). This seems like a bug? I would be happy to try and replicate on the demo - can you link it to be sure I have the right one?

Too bad by the way that this is hardcoded... I hope that will be changed. Especially in the future more and more people will be with unknown email address, but only with messenger handles, account names on social media etc. It would be great if every civicrm owner could eventually set their own 'required fields'.