Publié
2011-11-21 18:01
Having just had to import data that included a membership number for a client, rather than make a new field for the number it made sense to use the Contact ID, given that this is already a consecutive number and unique to each contact. The problem was that over the years there were big gaps in the consecutive numbers.
While the following is pretty straightforward, I've seen this issue brought up a number of times on the forum so I've written up what we did so that others may find their solution here! I hope its useful:
http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC40/Import+previously+assigned%2C+non-consecutive+membership+numbers+as+Contact+ID%27s
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Comments
I'd recommend creating memberships with the old membership numbers rather than using Contact ID's, especially if you want them to be consecutive in future and have non-member contacts in the system (or might in future).
Andrew
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Community Builders Australia
The reason we chose to use contact ID's is that they remain unique to the user, even if the membership expires there is a way to find them and add them with the same membership number as they always had. But you're quite right it doesn't work if membership numbers need to be consecutive if adding non member contacts to the system at any point - fortunately this is not a case for us and the membership numbers can go from anything to anything now they're imported.
Also I'm not so sure you can import memberships mapped to the membership ID - which means that a certain level of coding knowledge is most likely needed - whereas the above can be pretty much achieved without any knowledge of php/mysql.
But of course everyone's needs are different :)