Theresa/Felix - can you help me document the steps (just in text is fine for now) for merging records?
Kelly dropped Excerpt from Chad Cipiti Email 4-4-2021 7:44am (Need to pull key information from this message to bolster the how-to steps)
AFTER a merge is done, we MUST very critically look at the record immediately. That’s going to be for name fields, and all contact information, to see if it “looks right”. We can outline all of that in SOPs, but it’s also just critically looking and understanding what’s happened and what could look off. Because it would appear that the merge process does some things that aren’t just magically perfect as is, and will take some human review, not just going through a checklist.
This is all totally understandable as the variables for merging two records are pretty large, and while Impexium’s process is very robust there, with all of our intricacies, it just needs to be reviewed, especially when a Registry record, but really in all cases since these situations below could cause other weirdness down the road.
Blank Name Fields
I can’t say exactly what happened here, but if the merge “from” record had those blank, if those custom fields were selected, those would have blanked out the “to” record.
When doing a merge, just like with all organization record management, the DBA and LEN should be looked at. If those are all the same values, then it’s just those and it’s not a huge issue, but if those are/should be different, then it’s also the Use LEN and such.
So Kelly Langdon, if a Merge is going to be around a Registry record, I think that this needs to be scheduled in such a way that you can take a look that same day to confirm all. Obviously we’re having a separate discuss on this whole topic. I think that once you weigh in, if I have James adjust the “name script” to work in reverse in these situations, then that would also be “fixed”.
Multiple Contacts
There was another issue which is that after the merge, there were two addresses. It looks like 1165909 was “301 Main Street” since that was Primary, and that the other one was a PO box since that wasn’t.
However, the result was that BOTH of them were checked off as Shipping, Billing, and Directory, screen shot below. The database “allows” that technically, but functionally we shouldn’t have that. We need ONE of each of those if there are multiple addresses. I unchecked all of them for the PO Box.
Likewise there were two sets of Fax and Main phone numbers, nearly the same. While that’s “okay”, it’s not ideal, so two should be removed. Just looking at them to see that’s not right and adjusting.
There were not doubled up Emails or Web Links, but those should be checked as well.
Registry Snapshots
Reminder for all that the records for confirmations are NOT in Impexium at all. They would NEVER be affected by a Merge directly, as long as the Org’s ID and Uber Parent stay they same, they are fine. There wasn’t an issue there at all.
When I looked at the snapshots, what I saw was that there were actually TWO entity records for this Organization. That was due to the fact that it joined in both addresses. My code for that wasn’t expecting there to be two “Is Primary Shipping” addresses. (There are many places where I’ve already accounted for that possibility for say multiple “Work”, but I thought the shipping would only be ALLOWED to be a single one. That’s not the case. So I’ve adjusted the code for the Snapshots so that situation will be okay. Even if there are two, it’s going to now only pull one, and will use the one marked Primary if that exists, if not, it’ll use the most recent one. I think that’ll take care of this situation even if the Address records aren’t “fixed” post merge.
Of course the DBA and LEN were also blank, and that will be fixed since I put them back.
Registry Push
The snapshot that ran last night had the record attached to the PO Box and blank names. (I force deleted the 2nd row in the Snapshot.) With the new setup, when it runs tonight (Sunday night) it should populate the names as well as the non-PO address. Then that should be seen as a full change in the Logs and do the Entity and Address pushes correctly.
We’ll have to confirm all of that Monday morning.