CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi to all,

While working on customizing some reports I noticed that I have entries in civicrm_participants that have identical contact_id and event_id (and all other fields, except register date).

I tried adding the same participant to an event and it was possible.

Is this a bug or are there reasons for allowing duplicate entries in events?

Best,
Goran

hey lobo,

these are offline registrations with no fee here (fee disabled, online registration disabled).

i think i see your point, here are some further thoughts (of lower priority ):

what's the use case for the incomplete ones? wouldn't it work for everyone if the incomplete registration were simply updated? between civicrm_contribution (through civicrm_participant_payment) for which you can have multiple payment records (incomplete, cancelled, ...) and participant statuses it seems that civicrm_participant could be kept semantically cleaner.

or was the idea that civicrm_participant is more like a log of event registrations with participant_status determining if they are counted as participants or are simply 'registration log' entries?

if the last one is true, then suggestions
- make some combination of status, event_id, contact_id unique on the table so that some integrity rules could be applied on the status workflow and clearer distinction between 'log of registrations' and 'list of participants' is made (for example for any participant status that has is_counted it should not be possible to have the same contact twice on the event)
- make it more clear on the event page/participant statuses in which case it is possible to have duplicates
- maybe offer two views of the participants on the event page - all registrations and list of participants
- civireport should then reflect this (maybe through easy way to select a set of final vs transitional statuses or countable vs all)

these comments are in essence mostly about semantics and documentation/descriptions/usability, as it was definitively unexpected for the end users here to have the same contact several times for an event.

best,
goran