CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I'm on Civi 3.0.2 (will be upgrading to 3.0.4 once that's out).

When merging contacts, if I check the 'events' box to move events over, if duplicate contact a had registered for the same event as duplicate contact b, then after the merge it shows that event twice on their contact page.

my organization staff is telling me this did not use to be the case, and that it's a bug, although i don't have a recollection. obviously, it'd be good if it didn't duplicate the same event if the merged contact had 2 of them.

ideas on if this is actually a bug or if it's technically the correct behavior and needs an improvement?

Well, it does seem to make sense conceptually; merge, in general, tries to be as simple as possible, so it most probably simply assumes that the resulting contact’s events are the ones of A + the ones of B (without special-casing the events that A and B share).

It’s definitely a bug, but I’d be surprised if it was working correctly before. I filed CRM-5720 to track/fix this.

Hm, very good point.

I’m thinking what would be the good path here – whether it should be the safe one (i.e., keep doing what we’re doing now and let the admin sort out the double participations), the unsafe one (i.e., assume that double participations are to be merged – and use the later one, chronologically?) or can we do some heuristics to choose either path based on the given case…

Emily, Peter – any comments?

Just saw this is the issue queue.  Merging participant records would be very bad for me.  We allow multiple registrations for a single contact and just treat it as one person holding multiple tickets.  Merging participant records would effectively mean we would no longer know how many tickets have been sold or when an event is full. 

If event registrations are a special case, they should maybe be an extra-special case with a clear and obvious choice when merging contacts as to whether to merge or move the participant records.