CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi Richard,

The feature you're asking for also makes sense to add for contributions that are connected to a membership.

There's a roadblock to the plan as you've laid it out - and a semi-solution as well.

First - you want to import an event ID, and create a record in civicrm_participant_payment.  However, you would also need to create a record in civicrm_participant.  In theory, this isn't hard, but it only handles one use case.  I think there'd soon be complaints from folks who wanted to connect an existing participant record to a contact, who wanted to set participant role/status, etc. - essentially, one would have to merge the "import participants" with "import contributions" entirely.  I think it'd be a pretty big undertaking to do this robustly - and I don't think there's a call for adding a weak implementation in the core product.

That said - there's a few ways to do this today, using the API, without changing the core code.
* You could install the CiviCRM API CSV import GUI extension (https://civicrm.org/extensions/api-csv-import-gui).  I'm not sure if this supports chained API calls; if it does, you're golden.  If not, you should hire someone (like Eileen, who wrote this extension) to implement chained API calls.

* If you're unwilling to hire someone to add this feature, you can use the API CSV Import GUI to do the import in 2-3 parts.  Import the contribution (w/o the event ID), import the participant ID, then import the participant_payment record.  It's unpleasant, but better tedious than impossible!

I have a client in a similar situation - they need to import new contacts, a membership record, a contribution, and a membership_payment, all in a single import.  We're going to write them a custom extension - though maybe I'll check out how much work it'd be to add chained API calls to Eileen's extension.