CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I have a custom data field of the type "contact reference" associated with my Organizations; I want to use this contact reference field to point to a "primary rep" and a "billing rep" for the Organizations. Both the primary and billing rep are Individual contacts.

I'm trying to do an import that Updates the Organizations, and inserts a name into one of the contact reference fields, but I'm unable to do so -- CiviCRM reports invalid values for each name. The names I'm using definitely exist as Individual Contacts, but I can't figure out how to format the rows in my CSV file so that the data will import successfully.

Is it possible to import data for a contact reference field? If so, how should I approach it?

Thanks for the pointer Lobo. I tried your suggestion and Import to ContactReference fails with a contact ID as well, so I dug into the code a bit. I was able to grok how Import uses validation rules, and there's no ruleset in place for ContactReference data types, so it's logical that it errors out no matter what value is used. I was able to hack together a quick-fix for my project, but will submit a patch for import by contact ID once I get out of the weeds.

Hi,

I've been having quite good success using Migrate to populate contact reference fields. I'm still pretty early in my experiments with it - I wrote an initial blog & will write up how I get on