CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

When doing an import i only have the particpant id, contact id, or external id.

 1.  can i have email address as an option?   
 2. Whats the difference between participants id and contact id.

1. That is not possible without code changes in 2.0 and 2.1. You can probably do an export to get the contact_id <-> email mapping, do a merge of the two files and then import the resultant file

2. a contact could be a participant in one or more events. i.e. the same contact_id could have multiple participant ids. Giving us a participant id, allows us to find the relevant contact id

3. This might also need some code changes in 2.0. I think the code changes might be fairly trivial, especially if this is a participant search (i.e. we already have the participant ids). 2.1 is improving the export feature of all components. You can try it on the sandbox (http://sandbox.civicrm.org/)

lobo

guess what i can do, is do an update of all the partipants with the email address ( a regular import of contacts) and add a unique external id.. and then do the event partipants again using the external id.    just need to remember to delete the external id afterwerds

Ok now i get it...thanks for all your help.. i summary:

when the participant is already registered for an event, he/she has a particant id #   and if you would like to change the status( registered, attended) you need to have this particpant id # to change it.. therefore you export the participants this will give you the participants id #  you can now import with the change of status

When you wish to import participants who are not registered in the db yet,  then you do the two step process by doing an import of contacts and assigning a unique value to the external id.  then doing import for events using the external id  ..this will now CREATE a new participant id # .