**Copying this from the Tessnet Technical list-- on behalf of Lisa D. McColgan**
Hi all -
We have a question regarding merging constituent records in Tessitura — specifically, what is kept and what disappears when two records are merged.
A staff member here scheduled a merge in the system. We had two records with the same address, only one was under the wife's name and the other was under the husband's (they have different last names). The record to be kept was the wife's (as she is in the pipeline to be considered as an Overseer), but we assumed that the husband's name would be kept in some area of the record once the merge happened. This was not the case. Can someone confirm or explain what exactly is "lost" when two records are merged? Thanks!
-Lisa
Lisa D. McColganHuntington Theatre CompanyOffice of Development264 Huntington AvenueBoston, MA 02115-4606(617) 273-1546
Posted on behalf of Dale Audoin from NYC Opera
The things that do not get transferred from the delete account to the keep account include:
N1 and N2 information regardless of any blanks or nulls in the keep account
Mail/phone/emarket restrictions (only the ones on the keep account are kept, even if they are blank/null)
Phone1/2 and Address info from the delete account does get transferred to the keep account but will show in the addresses tab as inactive. Same with email addresses from the delete account, they do not disappear, they show as inactive in the addresses tab.
In the names tab - salutations, all sals from the delete account are transferred except where there are two salutations with the same type, then the one from the delete account gets deleted. Same with the Names - Program Lists/ Preferred Names.
You'll also want to be careful when both accounts have active memberships - that can get messy
Pretty much all other information gets transferred.
When merging two accounts with two different names, keep in mind that the N1 on the delete account will probably become N2 on the keep account which means any info in places like constituencies, attributes, research, associations etc. on the delete account where N1 is specified would have to manually be changed to N2.
So many things to think about!! These are but a few.
You can also add trapping for errors like the Name 1 / Name 2 problems in the LP_VALIDATE_CUST_MERGE procedure. There is already sample code in that procedure to look for membership duplications. Don’t forget to use the LP_CONST_MERGE procedure, which gets called during the merge process, to put in some extra merging for Local Tables used in the Custom Tab.