Improvements to merge or perhaps a warning message

[joanne]

I manually merge duplicates quite often usually with the intended result, but I was caught out the other day as follows:

Record 1 had (amongst other things) contributions and an expired membership of org A
Record 2 had (amongst other things) contributions and a current membership of org A

I wanted to merge record 1 into record 2 and end up with all the contributions and a current membership of org A with the member since and start dates from record 1 and a "new" end date  which was record 1 end date + 24 months.  (Record 2 end date was 2 months earlier than that).

So I set the merge to "bring across" the contributions and membership from record 1 and didn't tick the add new box.

Result: Record 2 had the expired membership of Org A that came from record 1 (fine - I was expecting to have to change the end date) but the contribution record linked to the membership from record 2 was deleted.

Now I understand why it happened, the membership on record 2 was deleted so the contribution linked to it was deleted, but I wasn't really expecting that to happen, I had just assumed all the contributions would remain. 

So I don't know whether to:

• put this down to "How dumb can you get - think before you merge"
• suggest there should be an explicit warning about contribution loss in the pop up help text (I could submit a PR for that)
• suggest that the default (or perhaps only) behaviour should to be to always add the memberships from the merged records ( ie get rid of the add new and just always do that)
• suggest the merge function should be more intelligent resulting in no loss of contributions and  just one membership of org A with the earliest member since and start dates and the latest end date form the existing memberships.

   

What do others think?

[Dave Greenberg]

Hi Joanne - I just did a similar test in 4.5 alpha and my results were mostly similar.

Record 203 had (amongst other things) contributions and an expired membership of org A
Record 204 had (amongst other things) contributions and a current membership of org A

I merged record 204 into record 203, checked 'Memberships' and 'Contributions' to be merged, did NOT check 'add new'.

Results:
Record 203 has the current membership with it's start / end date (moved from record 204). This seems fine.
Record 203 has one contribution (the one moved over from record 204 - also fine)
The contribution which was linked to 203's membership signup has been deleted - THIS IS A BUG!!!

Bottom line is that we should never delete a contribution record from the merged contact UNLESS the user has unchecked the 'merge contributions' box.

New issue filed here:
https://issues.civicrm.org/jira/browse/CRM-14800