Author Topic: Importing Relationships Creates Name-only Duplicate Contacts (Read 536 times)

ThomasTheSlug · April 03, 2015, 01:28:17 pm

I'm aware from the documentation that to import relationships, you have to go in phases. Even when I do this, I'm getting a new contact created with the relationship instead of updating the existing one. For example,

I have 2 individuals in the database who are married to each other, Arthur Ablabab and Phyllis Ablabab.
I import Arthur Ablabab with two new columns, "Spouse of First Name" and "Spouse of Last Name", and map those to the appropriate fields. I have "Fill" rule on.
I check my contacts and find that there is a new individual with no email or any other info but the name "Phyllis Ablabab" who has the relationship of "Spouse of" to Arthur.

What am I doing wrong here?

JonGold · April 03, 2015, 02:04:58 pm

I had this problem myself this week, but I'm pretty sure I resolved it - to be honest, I can't quite remember.

The issue is that the same duplicate matching rule you use for the import also applies for determining whether a record is a duplicate when adding them via a relationship. The default duplicate matching rule is going to match on e-mail address - which you're not importing. My suggestion is to make a new duplicate matching rule that triggers on first+last name, and set that as your dedupe rule when running the import, and the issue should go away.

IIRC, I ended creating that rule after I saw a whole bunch of duplicates creates this way - the good news was that because they ONLY had first/last name + the relationship, I was able to retroactively fix the problem with "Batch Merge Duplicates" using my dedupe rule.

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Author Topic: Importing Relationships Creates Name-only Duplicate Contacts (Read 536 times)

ThomasTheSlug

Importing Relationships Creates Name-only Duplicate Contacts

JonGold

Re: Importing Relationships Creates Name-only Duplicate Contacts