#169 Search duplicate company

[weipengchow]

Good day. There are times when you enter a big database
but you don't know if your colleague has entered the
company / contact earlier. This would create double
entry.
I've tried to search in the forum if there is anyway to
find out duplicate company names or contact names in
XRMS (perhaps a plugin) but I couldn't find any
solution.
Hopefully there is a solution to this problem. Thank
you.

Regards,
Eddie

[Brian Peterson]

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Thanks for your inquiry. Let's explorer this a little bit.

If the company name matches an existing company name, XRMS
will attempt to not create a new compnay, but rather append
to the existing company, to avoid duplicate entries.

If you try to add a contact in an existing company, XRMS
will again check the name and email address, and append data
instead of entering new data if the name and email match.

There are several areas where this is not quite sufficient.
If the company name or contact name is not exactly the
same, ort if one record is missing data. Also, the checks on
'import' are slightly different than the checks when you add
a new record from the user interface.

It would also be nice to have a search for similar records
in XRMS (other than the manual search) that would show all
potential duplicates.

Another feature that the development team has been talking
about recently would be a set of 'merge' functions in the
API for merging two company or contact records. These API
functions would take two records that a user has marked as
duplicates and merge the data, keeping common data, adding
new fields from one record to the other, and resolving
conflicts with user input.

These features would be a welcome addition to XRMS.
Unfortunately, they are rather low on the priority list.
So, if they are important to you, I suggest that you either
work with the development team to add these features, or
sponsor the development of theses features.

Regards,

- Brian

[weipengchow]

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user_id=1501958

Brian,
Thanks for your prompt response. You mentioned that "If the
company name matches an existing company name, XRMS will
attempt to not create a new compnay, but rather append
to the existing company, to avoid duplicate entries."
However, when I purposely create a new company using
existing company name, XRMS will create a new company with
new code rather than append to the existing company info.
I'm wondering why? My version of XRMS is 2006-04-26-v1.99.1