CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I was recently working on an issue where my client needed to change the membership status on a whole bunch of records. We needed to override the normal membership cycle for these records so that they would be changed to expired by the scheduled job, so the simple solution seemed to be to create an admin-only membership status, and use a profile to batch update and set the status override flag on those contact records we needed to change.

But the status override field isn't available to be used in a profile.
 
The on-screen documentation about admin-only statuses reads as follows:

Administrator Only?   
Check this box if this status is for use by administrative staff only.
If checked, this status is never automatically assigned by CiviMember.
It is assigned to a contact's Membership by checking the Status Override flag when adding or editing the Membership record.
Start and End Event settings are ignored for Administrator statuses.
EXAMPLE: This setting can be useful for special case statuses like 'Non-expiring', 'Barred' or 'Expelled', etc.

Which suggests that in order to apply an admin-only status the override flag must be set first.
Interestingly it is possible to use a profile to change the membership status to an admin-only status without setting the override flag.

However, when the scheduled job runs the admin only status appears to be ignored and CiviCRM applies the status that it believes to be correct based on the dates in the membership record.

Although perhaps not strictly a bug I would argue that this is this unhelpful behaviour. Either the status override field should be available to profiles thereby enabling a membership status to be batch updated, or the membership status field should only be available to profiles in view-only mode.

I ended up making my changes in the database.