CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I'm pretty sure this issue has been around a while. I know i've been meaning to post this for a while.

Here is a scenario that I find problematic (this happens in 2.2 and using profiles during online registration or contributions.):

You include a profile on an event registration page with basic fields like first/last name, phone, address.  Now let's say the phone field is not required.  A person comes to register anonymously and since the phone field is not required, s/he leaves it blank by mistake or something. Instead of CiviCRM just ignoring that field, it erases the phone number for that record that's already in there! Not good.

This happens regardless of the profile's "update on duplicate match" setting. And also happens with profiles used as signup forms.

Now I understand an easy work around for this is to make the field required but it shouldn't have to be.  I also know using the checksum functionality in CiviMail would help but not all people will get to the event/donate pages via CiviMail.

So my proposal is that if a field in a profile is left blank, it should make no change to the existing field in the database. It should only overwrite the data in that field if someone enters something.

What do people think about this? Am I missing some logic here?

Thanks for your time
tony

Sorry for not being clear. This is for anonymous users so the profile will be blank for them.

tony