CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

We urgently need and will sponsor a custom extension for the functionality explained below.

1. Existing situation

During the process of registering for an event (ex. http://www.ceps.eu/civicrm/event/register?id=831&reset=1), we collect usual details, plus Organization name, job title and department.

If there is a existing database contact which is a match (first and last names and email) of the data entered, then the data entered will overwrite the existing database contact. The problem is that people use small caps, or ALL CAPS, or enter EC instead of European Commission, etc.

For example:
Existing contact:
Richard Pools, Personal assistant to the CEO, European Commission, richard.pools@ec.eu

After Richard fills up the form registering for an event it becomes:
richard pools, pa to the ceo, EC, richard.pools@ec.eu

The resulting record could not be used for badges nor for list of participants, so the secretary has to go through the whole list of registrations and fix where needed, and she has to do this for every event (2-3 per week).

2. What should be done (via civicrm extension)

The current event registration procedure is:
- when a match is found - update the existing data with the data entered
- when no match is found - create new record

We need it changed to:
- when a match is found
     - check if an event registration exists, if do not create another
     - leave the existing data as is
- when no match is found - create new record


Additional information:

1. We use an unsupervised dedupe rule that matches first name, last name and email address.
The problem is that the contact record already in the database gets overwritten with anything submitted via the form.

2. We use hashed links in our mass emails so that when user reach the registration his/her details are pre-filled.

3. It is not possible to make our contacts log-in to the website and thus have their forms pre-filled. We tried it in the past, didn't work.

Hi Xavier,

We need it now.

We are using the extension https://github.com/TechToThePeople/civicrm-normalise
We do really big job on keeping the database up to date and do not rely on user input for this.
Just the opposite - user input makes the things worse - that is why we need an extension to change the default Civi behavior.
I am sure many people will welcome such an option.

Cheers,
Rado

Are you wanting an extension that will work with 4.1? or are you planning to upgrade?

Sorry, I forgot to update my profile. We are on Civi 4.4.6 with plans to upgrade to 4.5.

And to confirm, the problem eg for Richard described below is not as a result of him clicking the checksum/hashtag presumably?

No, clicking on checksum works. Problem arises when we have a registration page with empty fields.