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Create a new contact, set the company field to the internalid of customer, set the contactrole field to -10 for Primary

Is there a way to specify an existing contact as primary?

if you use nlapiAttachRecord or record.attach and provide attribute {role:-10}. That should do it. Setting the contactrole field only seems to work when the contact is part of a customer. For a vendor you would need to use attach.

I mean a contact that's already on the customer.  For example to change which one is primary.

If you set the contactrole field on the contact to -10 and save the contact that should work for a customer. The previous primary contact will no longer be primary. Using attach as I described also works regardless of the contact already been linked to the given customer.

OMG.  It actually works.  You need to use 'role' not 'contactrole' though.  We abandoned a project about 2 years ago because NS told us this couldn't be done via script.

 I know it’s been working for at least a year on my account