CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

We don't actually handle our own gift processing, and so import large numbers of donations from CSV files provided by our parent organization.  Each contribution carries a unique transaction ID that they assign, so we have a reasonable basis for dupe detection if CiviContribute somehow would support it.

The problem right now is this -- we are not confident that when we did our initial load of donations we actually managed to import everything correctly -- some contributions do not show up that should.  It would be very handy to be able to "replay" a number of large imports and either have duplicate transactions rejected at upload time, or query/remove them from the database afterwards.  So I guess there are two questions:
is there a way to have CiviContribute reject an import record based on non-uniqueness in a custom data field (as it will with  contacts), or does someone have a de-duping script that operates directly against the database?

All the best,
Tb.

This is an old topic, but we ran into a similar problem and I wanted to update with the outcome of our own testing.

When I attempt to import a contribution whose transaction ID already exists, using email as a "match to contact" field, and selecting "import new" rather than "update," CiviCRM does give me an error that the contribution is a duplicate, and the record does not import. This was the behavior we'd hoped for; it means we can run a contribution import file through more than once and not have to worry about dupes being created for contributions that made it into the system the first time.