Solution Found: Importing Shared Addresses

[TeakMcGlukes]

I just wanted to write up something that I figured out how to do that I wasn't able to find elsewhere on the site.  It deals with importing shared addresses.  For search engine purposes, it could also be called:

• "Use another contact's address"
• "Address belongs to"
• "Master Address Belongs To"

This feature is extremely handy for multiple contacts that share a single address.  In the contact file, you can click "Use another contact's address" and then pick a contact.  Now, the contact you are on uses the other contact's address.  This saves a lot on data entry, plus down the road when that business moves or the contact information changes, it'll update all the related accounts.

The problem was that I couldn't figure out a good way to do that en masse.  But tinkering brought me to it.  I am on version 4.3.7.

• What I did, and I don't know how you'd get around this, is that I already had both the parent and children contacts in the system (through an import but could be done any way).
• Look up the Internal Contact ID for the child contacts.  This in the contact's file, or can be looked up in phpMyAdmin.
• You'll need to look at the SQL database for this one, I use phpMyAdmin.  In the civicrm_address table, you'll need to look up the 'id' field for the parent address.  This is the key or index for the table, do not use the contact_id which is readily available in the system everywhere (pick up on the annoyance?).  This is the only real "catch" that makes the process slow down.
• Create your import file with just the child Internal Contact ID in one column and the civicrm_address.id in the other.
• Go to import contacts, use the "individual" and "update" options.
• Map the Internal Contact ID of the children to "Internal Contact ID*"
• Map the civicrm_address.id column to "Master Address Belongs To"

.

• Finish the import.
• Go to the parent contact ID and "edit" the address you just mapped to everyone.  It should give you a warning, "Editing Master Address: This address is shared with 21 contact record(s). Modifying this address will automatically update the shared address for these contacts."
• You don't actually have to make any modifications, just save it.
• Now go back to the associated children and the address should be updated.

It sounds like a hassle, it is somewhat.  But, I have almost 6,000 contacts from about 200 companies, so associating those addresses is crucial and makes for clean data and uniformity.

Let me know if you need any help.

Teak

[Erik Hommel]

Thanks for sharing!

[linkx]

Teak,

Thank you for this! We recently discovered that Shared Address works wonders for our use-case, so needed to update 2k contacts to share an address with their Current Employer. Using your tip, here is the query that I used:

Code: [Select]

SELECT civicrm_contact.id, civicrm_address.id FROM civicrm_contact INNER JOIN civicrm_address ON civicrm_contact.employer_id=civicrm_address.contact_id
Then dumped the results into a CSV and imported according to your instructions. Worked great!