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Author Topic: distinguishing between contacts with the same name  (Read 696 times)

Pauln60

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distinguishing between contacts with the same name
June 05, 2012, 12:56:19 pm
I'm filling out a 'new activity' and selecting the applicable contact autocompletion of the name field... but there are two contacts with the same name in the system, and there doesn't seem to be any way to distinguish between them.  Any suggestions how to get around this?

Thanks,
Paul N.

Dave Greenberg

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Re: distinguishing between contacts with the same name
June 05, 2012, 03:58:31 pm
Most of the auto-completes in CiviCRM provide "sort name" + "email address" by default, and can be additionally configured to include a few other fields like phone or city to help differentiate. However, the 'multiple select auto-complete' widget used in the activity form doesn't currently have that feature. I think it would be great to be consistent with other auto-complete instances - but no idea what effort would be involved. If you have resources to investigate and potentially come up with a patch that would make this widget behave like the other one - that would be cool.

The workaround is to find the contact first using the auto-complete "quick search" - top left hand corner of all screens. Then select  <whatever activity> from the Actions button.
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Pauln60

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Re: distinguishing between contacts with the same name
June 06, 2012, 07:27:27 am
Many thanks for the very useful reply.

We're just getting into CiviCRM - there's a more intrinsic issue with identifying people uniquely... seems to me a unique (individual) contact record consists of a name, role and organization.  So I may create an activity record  for Jane Smith who a developer in the IT department in MyOrg,   If Jane is promoted to IT manager, she is still in MyOrg and probably still has the same email address.  The activities applied to the Jane Smith contact record likely are relevant primarily to her role when the activities were created.  Presently it's pretty awkward to maintain this role separation in the display and management of records - the viewpoint seems to be that the person is uniquely defined only be name and email address.

Any thoughts on this?

Thanks,
Paul

Dave Greenberg

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Re: distinguishing between contacts with the same name
June 06, 2012, 09:06:33 am
I'm not clear on what functionality you're looking for in terms of "role separation". That said, I'm wondering whether the CiviCase model of keeping activities in "case containers" and assigning various roles to cases based on case type might be useful to your organization.

http://book.civicrm.org/user/case-management/what-is-civicase
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Pauln60

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Re: distinguishing between contacts with the same name
June 07, 2012, 06:36:46 am
"Role separation" - maybe not the best term.  But the main idea is that an activity involves the organizational role first and foremost, and the actual person secondarily.  So if I want to maintain the thread of a set of interactions with (for example) the IT manager of organization X, I want to look at activities involving the IT manager, not Jane Smith, and ideally it should be clear when the activity is created that it's the IT manager, whoever that may be, who is being referenced.

We looked at CiviCase, but decided it was a little too complicated for what we've doing.

Paul

Dave Greenberg

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Re: distinguishing between contacts with the same name
June 07, 2012, 11:39:38 am
Thinking about options for modeling this requirement given the current schema. Not coming up w/ anything really elegant since you can't link activities to a relationship.

You might experiment with using activity target ("With") to point to a contact record that represents a position at an organization (maybe this is a subtype of organization contact type?) which is linked via relationship to the current position holder. For usablity - you might also populate the activity assignee as the actual person (individual contact record). Assignee could potentially be automatically populated with  pretty simple hook which grabs the position holder via relationship.

Maybe just an idea starter ... since it seems a bit kludgy....
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  • distinguishing between contacts with the same name

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