Is there a way to update the contact.addressee field in batches?

Question

I have about 50,000 contacts to update and I have a scheduled update greeting job set up (based on this post Update addressee values for all contacts after modifying Addressee Type Options - thanks Sean!)

If I run the scheduled job, it never completes (it hits a max execution time limit.) I did find that I can limit the number of contacts (to say 2500) with the limit parameter, and the job will complete. But my assumption is that if I run the job again it just updates my first 2500 contacts over again. Is that a correct assumption?

Is there another way I can update the contact.addressee token in batches to avoid hitting the max execution time?

Answer 1

There are several solutions. I'll go from least to most work - though the "least work" solutions generally need a level of expertise that the "most work" solutions don't.

• You can edit your max_execution_time in php.ini.
• The default execution time when running from the command line is unlimited. So you could run cv api Job.update_greeting or the equivalent using drush or wp-cli if you don't have cv installed.
• Greetings are updated whenever a record is updated. An easy way to batch update records is to import a list of all the contact IDs you want to update with no other info. This will force an update and thus a greeting update.
• You can delete all your addressee values that need updating (or all of them!) through MySQL/phpMyAdmin, then use "Update Greetings" with a limit of 2500 and set force equal to 0. With force equal to zero, only contacts without addressees will be updated, so you won't do the same 2500 every time.