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Author Topic: Relationships between merged contacts  (Read 736 times)

ken

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Relationships between merged contacts
September 08, 2010, 06:06:40 pm
Scenario 1: On the 3.2 demo, I just created two contacts and a relationship between them. After merging the two, I end up with a contact that relates to itself.

Scenario 2: (which I didn't test but I see in some posts here) if contacts A and B both relate to C with relation T, then after merging A into B, there are 2 relationships of type T from B to C.

I want to open a discussion about the desired behaviour here.

My thoughts?
  • Both Scenarios should offer the user a warning that a self-relationship or a duplicate relationship is about to be (or has been) created. Then the user has the option of cleaning up the data.
  • The current interface doesn't deal with individual relationships (the merge is all or nothing). I feel it would make the interface more difficult to use to give the user control over which relationships are merged and which aren't.
  • At the moment, CiviCRM doesn't stop people creating self-relationships or duplicate relationships, perhaps on the assumption that the human operators know what they're doing. Will this assumption remain valid for the automated deduplication functionality? I don't think so. I'd suggest that the automated deduplication logic should report that it has created self- or duplicate- relationships.

Peas and beans!
Ken

mneimeyer

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Re: Relationships between merged contacts
March 16, 2011, 11:24:21 am
I know this is an older post I'm responding to but I'm having a related problem to what Ken describes...

Let us suppose you have 4 individuals Copy1OfMe, Copy2OfMe, Sister and Brother. Copy1 and Sister have a sibling relationship, Copy2 and Brother have a sibling relationship. Both Copy1 and Copy2 are current employees of Acme Co. One day you notice Copy1 and Copy2 and merge them into Copy1. You end up with a contact that has four relationships. Copy1 to Brother, Copy1 to Sister, Copy1 to Acme and Copy1 to Acme.

I understand why Acme is in there twice BUT if I edit either relationship BOTH have the "Current Employee" box checked. If I delete either relationship it removes the Current Employee checkbox from the other relationship and Copy1 no longer has a current employer listed on the summary page.

We have used custom fields on relationships before so I can understand why relationships aren't examined in much depth (it could easily get real complicated to merge that sort of thing) but at the same time to totality of it all seems to almost move beyond "annoying" into "bug".

Or am I crazy... :)
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