Hi
It looks like even if you don’t require a postal address for record creation, if there are any postal addresses on a record one of them must be primary. When we get returned mail with no forwarding address, we are marking the address with a type of “Bad Address”. However, that is still an active, primary address that can be pulled into mailings if the correct suppressions are not in place. I don’t want to delete the bad address as it is good to have a historical record that we did have an address at one time since we do not require one. Does anyone have any ideas about how to handle this in a way that does not require suppressions?
Thanks
Jess Levy
SFMOMA
jlevy@sfmoma.org
I've run into the exact same conundrum. Personally, I think this is a shortcoming in the application design -- if you can configure your database to accept constituent records with no address, a constituent record should be able to exist with only inactive addresses. The best part is that (at least in 12.1.2) the constituent merge functions will happily create a constituent with only inactive addresses, if you are merging a constituent with an address into a constituent with no addresses. (I happen to think this is unintuitive behavior anyway, but that's a different issue.) I've submitted an enhancement request for this previously, and would encourage you to do the same.
In the meantime, I was doing the same kind of workaround by using an "Inactive primary address" type, but it was too easy for this to get pulled into an output set or extraction. So, I did away with that and devised a workaround so that these bad addresses could bet set to inactive status, which is really the only way for the database to accurately represent reality in these cases. What I have done is created a contact point purpose whose name is "Inactivate This Address". What the end user does, if they encounter an address that the client application will not let them inactivate (in the case of there being no other addresses on the account to be made the primary), is to apply this contact point purpose to the address in question. Then, a nightly database procedure scans for addresses with this purpose, and sets them directly to be inactive and non-primary (also removing the purpose). This could probably also be done with a service interceptor for a more realtime correction.