Possible to use alphanumeric Customer ID?

[danef79]

We have an auto parts site built in Magento 1.9.x and are trying to sync things up with our new parts/database system (Autopart & OpenWebs). The issue is that our local system has customer ID numbers that are alphanumeric and it would take a LOT of work to convert them to numeric only which is what Magento 1.9.x requires.  

My question is whether or not it's possible to modify Magento 1.9.x to accept customer ID's with alphabetic characters in them?

And if not, is Magento 2.2.x capable of such a modification?

Hopefully I explained this with enough detail, thanks for your help.

[motivepower]

Maybe you could just create a customer attribute that stores the alphanumeric Customer ID, and proceed with your integrations based on that?

[danef79]

Thanks for the reply.

I could create a custom attribute to use that would accept the alphanumeric but the problem is I need to use the core Magento Customer ID (not an attribute) as the unique identifier for a few reasons, and so it works natively with the Magento Store Manager software for auto-importing new customers from a CSV that our Autopart software exports (with alpha numeric customer ID's)..

Point being I really need to modify the base Customer ID in Magento to accept alpha characters but I'm just not sure it's possible. Crossing my fingers...

[danef79]

Does anyone else have any feedback on whether this is possible?

Thanks in advance!

[danef79]

Wanted to check on this again. Any help is MUCH appreciated.

[danef79]

Any suggestions would be appreciated, bumping this thread one last time.  

Thanks.