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Author Topic: Changing contact type (civicrm_contact.contact_type)  (Read 1398 times)

nkinkade

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Changing contact type (civicrm_contact.contact_type)
March 09, 2009, 10:34:18 am
I don't see a way to change a contact type through the web interface.  I can manually change the contact type (civicrm_contact.contact_type) in the database and it *seems* to work as expected.  However, I'm not sure if doing it that way may leave orphaned records lying around or cause other unexpected behavior.  Question: is there an official way to change the contact_type.  If not, is there anything I should be aware of when manually changing it in the database?  Or should it never be done for any reason?

Thanks!

Nathan 

Donald Lobo

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Re: Changing contact type (civicrm_contact.contact_type)
March 09, 2009, 11:46:46 am

i think with 2.x the implicatations of changing contact_type are quite minimal. the only thing i can think of is some fields are not used for different contact types, i.e. org does not use first/last name etc. ind does not use household_name etc

let us know how the experiments go. also whats your use case for changing contact_type?

lobo
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nkinkade

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Re: Changing contact type (civicrm_contact.contact_type)
March 10, 2009, 01:20:14 pm
It's nothing critical.  We just have 3 or 4 organizations who were entered with an "Individual" contact type ... crazy things like splitting the organization/company name between the first_name and last_name fields.  Now that we're getting CiviCRM all up-to-date and current, we are also trying to clean up the data.

I'll try changing the contact_type manually in the database.  If I don't report back, then assume it worked well, otherwise I'll post my experiences back here.

Thanks!

dharmatech

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Re: Changing contact type (civicrm_contact.contact_type)
March 10, 2009, 02:55:33 pm
If it helps, we had a client that used CiviCRM households when they should have used organizations (don't ask me why).  So we converted all HH contacts (a couple hundred) to organizations in the database and it worked great.

tony
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  • Changing contact type (civicrm_contact.contact_type)

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