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Author Topic: merging duplicates  (Read 1958 times)

cpelham

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merging duplicates
February 12, 2008, 07:48:27 pm
I am using CiviCRM 1.9 at the moment. Is there any way to merge duplicate records? I have a number of people with duplicate records and I find that they are duplicates easily enough, but I don't like that CiviCRM asks me to edit one of them rather than merge or delete, which is probably the usual desired response. Is there any merge records action anywhere?

When I do go to edit one of the duplicates, it is difficult to tell which one I am editing and which one I should delete. This should be a really quick process and yet I'm having to jump back and forth between several screens and windows. I think that, upon finding likely duplicates, they should all be displayed side by side if you will, so that we can quickly determine if they are in fact duplicates, and then we should be asked whether we want to edit one or merge or delete one or more of them. Al of that could be on one screen where we could check which fields  to keep and which to override in the merge.

If there is not any merge capability in 1.9, is there any in CiviCRM 2.0?

bchoc

  • Guest
Re: merging duplicates
February 12, 2008, 08:00:58 pm
From what I've seen, CiviCRM 1.9 lacks a way to manually match contacts as "duplicate" and merge them.  However, in the Administrative menu you should be able to use the "Find Duplicate Contacts" link and then quasi-automatically combine the resulting contacts.

That said, I'd also really like to see a manual compare and combine, because more often than not the duplicate check quietly fails for me (timing out, I guess).

bc

cpelham

  • Guest
Re: merging duplicates
February 12, 2008, 08:18:09 pm
Yes, the Find Duplicates script always times out on me. The import script has an option to combine, so this must be built in and just lacks a separate front end.

Donald Lobo

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Re: merging duplicates
February 12, 2008, 09:15:21 pm

Improving the de-dupe and merge part of the code will be part of a future 2.x release. There are no significant changes in this part of the code base in 2.0

chris: you might want to spec out in more detail along with screenshots some of your ideas on how dedupe and merge should potentially work. This will help us significantly when we revisit the issue.

There is no explicit merge capability in 1.9 or 2.0. Merge is normally triggered either from de-dupe or import

lobo
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bchoc

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Re: merging duplicates
February 13, 2008, 09:30:27 am
If we wanted to get a little feisty with our URLs, would it be legitimate to manually (or create a simple form to create) something like this:

Code: [Select]
/civicrm/contact/merge?reset=1&cid=999&oid=777
Where 999 and 777 are the pair of duplicate contact IDs.

Is there more to it than that?

bc

Donald Lobo

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Re: merging duplicates
February 13, 2008, 10:57:20 am

yeah, you should be able to use that url manually. let us know if you encounter any bugs :) please test on our 2.0 code base if possible

thanx

lobo
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cpelham

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Re: merging duplicates
February 13, 2008, 11:50:23 am
Works on 1.9. Brilliant. Made my day! As soon as I have a chance to install 2.0, I'll try it there, too.

bchoc

  • Guest
Re: merging duplicates
February 18, 2008, 01:03:04 pm
On the topic, I'm throwing this error whenever I try to merge two contacts:

"Fatal error: Cannot access empty property in /home/t4tcolor/public_html/sites/all/modules/civicrm/packages/DB/DataObject.php on line 2445"

There are empty fields in each of the records.  I noticed that in my DB (1.9) the dedupe shows some records as "[EMPTY]" whereas in the sandbox they appear simply blank.  I don't know if this is a 1.9/2.0 difference or perhaps related to the problem.

bc

Dave Greenberg

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Re: merging duplicates
February 18, 2008, 04:59:35 pm
If there's a way for you to test this issue with your data in 2.0 (by upgrading a copy of your site - if you haven't already done so) - that would be most excellent. We could see if there's still a problem needing fixing or not.
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  • CiviCRM Community Forums (archive) »
  • Old sections (read-only, deprecated) »
  • Support »
  • Using CiviCRM »
  • Using Core CiviCRM Functions (Moderator: Yashodha Chaku) »
  • merging duplicates

This forum was archived on 2017-11-26.