Why after importing contact records were Addressee field values set to "Customized" for records where Custom Addressee had a null value?

Question

I imported a large group of organisations into a sub-org group "Media". Some orgs had a specific generic addressee (ie, Editor) which I imported into the Custom Addressee field.

After import I noticed that any record that had a null value in Custom Addressee field now also had an Addressee field = "Customized" rather than the default Addressee tokens. This behavior seems a little odd but may be a product of how civi handles default field values that rely on tokens - guessing here.

I also tried to create a Profile that would allow me to bulk update the incorrect records. While it looked like I could select the default token string from the drop down list and civi seemed to be running the update nothing actually changed.

There are rather a lot of records to be going into each summary and changing them individually. Rather than doing a re-import and deferring import of Customs Addressee data until a subsequent import, I thought I would ask if anyone had a simple solution and/or an explanation for this behavior. Any assistance appreciated.

CiviCRM 4.4.10

Thanks

Answer 1

I came across the same issue after upgrading a very old civicrm DB to latest (4.7.27)- i ran the following simple queries to reset to my default IDs (listed at civicrm/admin/options/addressee?reset=1 )

UPDATE civicrm_contact
SET addressee_id = 1
WHERE contact_type = 'Individual';

UPDATE civicrm_contact
SET addressee_id = 2
WHERE contact_type = 'Household';

UPDATE civicrm_contact
SET addressee_id = 3
WHERE contact_type = 'Organization';

I didn't need to retain any existing or "customized" but if one did, adding AND isnull(addressee_id) should work