CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hello there,

I imagine that there is a limit on batch update via profile because otherwise that form would take up to much room and be unprocessable.  However it causes problems in a few different situations I've encountered.  Here's an example use case:

1) An organisation uses CiviCRM to take payments online and processes membership.

2) They post membership packs to their new members.  Because they get new members all the time, they prefer to do this weekly but by the end of most weeks they are looking at over 100 memberships.

3) They have a custom field associated with memberships called membership pack sent which they use to search for people that need membership packs and set to yes when the membership pack has been sent.

Problem: when there are more than 100 people that need batch updating things have to be processed in stages, which is painful and error-prone.

Long term solution: Implement an option in batch update (similar in concept to the "with all # records" / "Selected records only" radio box that appears in the contact selector) that offers the option to: "Update fields to the same value" or "Update individually (limited to 100 records)".  This could appear on the same screen that asks you to select a profile.

The "Update fields to the same value" screen is similar to the normal batch update screen but has just one record and and extra check box for each field called "leave orginal value" that disables the field when checked.

I'd say this is a good addition because even though the current system scores extremely highly for usability (magically and temporily making your data as easy to edit as if it were in a spreadsheet) it does cause problems for the relatively common use case of lot of records that you want to update to the same value.

Short term solution: find the part of the code where the batch update limit is applied apply this 'psuedopatch'

- $batchUpdateLimit=100;
+ $batchUpdateLimit=200;

Would be good to know your thinking on limiting to 100.  Any other reasons?  Apart form the limit on number of form fields that you can submit, can you forsee any problems with applying the short term solution above?

Maybe this will be useful to someone else. On my local xampp server, for batch update of geocoding (full db transferred later), I changed max contacts to 1000. It works fine for me in that environment, but probably wouldn't be a good idea elsewhere. It takes a while, so I'm hesitant to go beyond 1000, but updating in increments of 100, with 100,000 voter records, was really getting me down.

In CRM/Contact/Form/Task/Batch.php:

protected $_maxContacts = 1000;

yes, agreed. would be good to push this setting and a lot of other constants like this into the system settings table

would be great if you can come over to the apeldoorn sprint and help start this process

lobo