There is no feature in GENERATIONS v3.5 or prior to merge a constituent. We’re looking at adding this to a future version, though in the meantime, what’s a GENERATIONS user to do? There are two ways that this can be performed, and it all depends on the situation. Both methods involve some work, and this help document is meant to serve as a checklist for the things that you’ll need to do.
Merging two constituents sounds easy enough on the surface, but you need to remember that GENERATIONS doesn’t store all of the constituent data in a single record. Yes, there is a Constituent record, but then there are transaction records, event invitations, attributes, (in GN 3.5 there are constituency records), address records, phone records, and others. All of these peripheral records are linked to the constituent using the constituent ID (a key field that you never really see that identifies a unique constituent). If as part of your “merging” process, you delete one of the constituent records, you’ll “orphan” all of these related records, meaning these related records will still exist, and they will be linked to a constituent record that no longer exists. Any merging procedure will need to take these related records into account.
Before you proceed – be sure you’ve got a backup.
Method One: If There’s Not Much Related Data
Let’s say that you have a pair of constituent records that you want to merge, we’ll call them constituent 1 and constituent 2 (C1 and C2 for short). Let’s say that C1 is the main constituent and you’d like to move the C2 data to the C1 record. Merging the name fields is easy enough. You copy the names from C2 to the spouse fields in C1. Presumably these people are living in the same household, so there’s no work to be done there. You’ll need to adjust the constituencies in C1 to reflect the constituencies of C2 if they’re different. Handling the related data then is a matter of navigating to the rest of the views in the C2 record and recreating that data in the C1 record. Assuming there’s not a lot of it, this should not be too difficult. The last step will be to delete the C2 record and all of the related records.
Method Two: If You’ve Got a Complex, “Lots of Related Data” Situation
There’s no getting around it, if you’ve got a complex situation on your hands, this may get pretty tricky. You’ll want to be sure that Method One isn’t going to work for you before you tackle this method. It involves editing layouts and editing key fields. Let me reiterate the warning above: before you proceed, make sure you’ve got a backup.
Get as much merging done as you can using Method One, then make a plan to deal with the related records. You’re going to first need the constituent ID’s of the two records in question. In constituents, drop into layout mode and place the field IDCON on the layout. Back in browse mode, make note of the values stored in these two fields. Now in your related tables (Transactions, Invitations, Attributes, Relationships, Actions…) do the same thing, drop into layout mode and place the field IDCON on the layout. In each of these related tables, perform a find in the IDCON field for records where the IDCONequals the ID of C2. Be sure to use the find criteria “==” instead of simply “=” since the latter will match records where the ID equals the find criteria or begins with the find criteria (e.g. searches for =C0012 will find records where the ID is C0012, C00121, C00122, C00123, etc… while searches for ==C0012 will find only C0012). When you have isolated all the records that are related to the C2 constituent, change the value in the ID field to the C1 ID, and use your Records/Replace menu function to change all records in the found set to the new ID. Repeat this procedure in all related tables.
As I said above, this is a pretty advanced technique, don’t try this at home kids.
