Author Topic: Contact search finds emails but not names (Read 423 times)

nseltzer · February 14, 2012, 02:45:31 pm

It appears that contact records' names are being overwritten by their email. An example: I do a search for Smith, Scott and get no results. I know this person is in our contact database, so I find a group that he is in and search for group members. He is listed in the group members, but where his name should be in the result list is instead his email. When I go to the individual contact record, his first and last name are still shown in the profile in the right spots. This is problematic when someone's email address in no way resembles their name--it becomes a game of "find the email address" so that I can pull up a contact record. Why is this happening? It appears to happen over time, with more and more records being affected. Any advice on how to both fix and prevent this would be much appreciated!

Dave Greenberg · February 14, 2012, 03:56:46 pm

What seems to be happening is that the "sort_name" column in the contact table is being set to the contact's email address. Normally, sort_name is derived from "lastname, firstname" when a contact record is saved, and it's only set to email address when no first and last name are provided. You should update your forum profile to indicate what version of CiviCRM, what CMS etc. you are using. Then list the ways that contacts are being input into your DB. For example, do you have a "mailing list signup" form on your site? Online contribution pages? Other forms (native civicrm forms or CMS forms) which interact w/ CiviCRM data? Seems like one of those input streams is either triggering a bug or is misconfigured or

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Author Topic: Contact search finds emails but not names (Read 423 times)

nseltzer

Contact search finds emails but not names

Dave Greenberg

Re: Contact search finds emails but not names