Author Topic: Preventing duplicates (Read 1340 times)

rparisi · January 25, 2011, 06:06:35 pm

I am having trouble with duplicates. There are hundreds of duplicate contact entries in my database, and they continue to be added. When a person registers for an event, they are not recognized by their name or e-mail, but instead are just added like a completely new contact. How do I set things up such that thisdoes not continue to occur?

petednz · January 26, 2011, 12:37:30 am

have you checked your settings for Duplicate Rules
/civicrm/admin/deduperules&reset=1

xavier · January 26, 2011, 01:45:42 am

Hi,

As Pete said, check the dedupe rule first (you might want to dig deeper into the topic reading the wiki or the book, definitely not trivial).

The other issue is that if John doe registers and that you have already 2 in the db, as civi doesn't know which one is the correct one, it creates a new contact.

X+

rparisi · January 27, 2011, 07:40:42 am

Peter and Xavier,

Thanks for the feedback. I am trying to educate myself on this. From what I can tell, there is already in place both a strict and fuzzy rule for each type of contact. Also, when I do a duplicate search, Civi definitely identifies a lot of duplicates. So the rules exist, and definitely work when implemented. I think maybe I need to modify my original question:

When a user comes to the site and enters their information, can the Civi be set up to prompt them if it recognizes their name or e-mail (e.g. to say something like, you are already registered with this site)? Or should Civi just recognize them and know that they are the same person by their name and e-mail?

Or maybe users should be required to create a username and password, and then log in. I purchased the CiviCRM book last week, and seem to remember reading something about that, but can't seem to find it for the life of me.

-Rick

petednz · January 27, 2011, 11:52:12 pm

always good to push people who will keep coming back to the site, to create an account and encourage them to login before donating etc. In Profiles in the Advanced Settings there is the option, if i recall right, to set it to 'tell person the contact already exists' or to 'update the info' etc

xavier · January 28, 2011, 12:07:01 am

Quote from: rparisi on January 27, 2011, 07:40:42 am

Or maybe users should be required to create a username and password, and then log in. I purchased the CiviCRM book last week, and seem to remember reading something about that, but can't seem to find it for the life of me.

Thanks for buying it, hope you find it useful.

You can go to the online version and search on it.

Question for everyone: Is the checksum already implemented for the donations ?

For quite a few operations, I find it easier to send the contacts a pre-filled form using the checksum token rather than asking to login. Beside, as drupal can't properly manage the redirection on its login form and get rid of all the get params, if you try to login from a page that has an id like a donation page, it comes back to the donation page url without the id, and civicrm spits a scary message about fatal error id missing end of the world that scares the users away and stop them to donate on a "buggy system that crashes all the time". But IMMV. end of the rant

X+

rparisi · January 28, 2011, 06:34:49 am

Pete: I agree, but I can't seem to find the " In Profiles in the Advanced Settings" you mentioned. Is this in CiviCRM? Or possibly in Joomla/Drupal? I should have mentioned that I am using Joomla for my CMS.

X: I finally found that passage. As it turns out, it wasn't in the section on duplcates, but rather in the beginning of the book in the case examples section. Unfortunately no details on how to do it.

Pete and X: I am looking at the username creation in Joomla, trying to figure this out. Thanks again for your help.

petednz · January 28, 2011, 11:06:53 am

not sure about joomla but this bit should be cms agnostic

so if you click on Profile Settings, at the bottom there is a collapsed section for Advanced Settings

not sure if that is what will sort you about, but helpful for you to know it is there

rparisi · February 01, 2011, 12:27:53 pm

Peter, I don't mean to be a moron, but I cannot find the settings you are talking about. Could you please give me the complete path I would follow in the CiviCRM menu tree?

Also, as I get into this, I realize that the duplicate problem is even worse than I realized. I was looking at players signed up for camps in which I used contribution pages, and noticed there were no contributions associated with their sign ups. So I did some looking into their contact records, and here is what I found:

When a person registers and pays for a camp, the CiviCRM creates 2 separate contact records for them. One for the registration and one for the payment. So I have to merge the records of each of these players. I have to get that fixed. Before this, I thought it was just creating a new contact record when they registered for a camp, ignoring the record from a previous registration (i.e. previous year’s camp). But to create 2 records every time they register for an event, that is simply retarded.

petednz · February 01, 2011, 12:47:15 pm

No problems.
http://drupal.demo.civicrm.org/civicrm/admin/uf/group&reset=1
Gives a list of all Profiles.
If you click on Settings for the Profile in question, near the bottom is a collapsed Adv Settings option where it offers
What to do upon duplicate match
- Issue warning and do not save
- Update the matching contact
- Allow duplicate contact to be created

with the following help

Quote

If you are using the profile as a contact signup and editing form - this option controls what happens if the data matches an existing contact record. Using this option user can update the matching record or create a duplicate record or otherwise he will get a 'duplicate record' warning, and their input will not be saved. Contact matching is based on your configured 'Strict' rule for identifying duplicate contacts. (learn more...)

This setting is ignored if the profile is embedded in an online contribution, membership signup or event registration form. In this case a contact match always results in the transaction being linked to the matching contact.

NOTE: If there are multiple matching contacts, the first matching record is used.

I may be leading you up the garden path as I am not sure if this is going to help or not - but at least we will both know that you are seeing the same options that I see ;-)

rparisi · February 28, 2011, 11:09:21 am

Peter,

Thank you for the help. I got pulled away from this for a while (apparently the entire month of February), but I think your information is what I am looking for and will hopefully get me to the solution of my problem.

Thanks again!
-Rick

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Author Topic: Preventing duplicates (Read 1340 times)

rparisi

Preventing duplicates

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