We implemented CiviCRM in our non-profit company CEPS (www.ceps.eu) for it fits very well our needs. We use it almost out of the box for contact management, memberships, mailing and event registration.
On problem we experienced immediately - people where able to change their data during the event registration process and we didn't like this. We keep our data up to date manualy and wanted that only event registration is registered, but didn't want the current user info to be updated with the form input.
At the moment of implementation we had Civi 4.1 and the only field used for deduplication via event registration was email. This produced huge discrepancies in our database on daily basis, as we have many constituents where everybody in the company have same email address ...
Upgrade to 4.4 improved the issue with making it possible to use unsupervised deduplication rule during event registration. So - same email address but diferent name issue is solved, but not the issue when somebody uses abreviations for company of department name, all caps or small caps, etc.
Finally we decided to look for help from Civi community, as we need this issue urgently solved.
We contacted Graham Mitchel for a solution and he proposed to mediate with Civi core team to add the following to the core in the next version and backport it to Civi 4.5.
When importing records into CiviCRM there is an option in relation to duplicate matching known as the “Fill” option, whereby where a duplicate is found the original data is kept, and only new data is added to that record (i.e. any field that already holds data takes precedence, and only where the field in the database is empty is new data added. This option is not currently available in the duplicate handling options for profiles, and our proposal is to add this, either via an extension, or into the core code.
(Update on 20.04.2015)
We found a really simple way to not allow data people enter overwrite the well structured data we have.
We will not support financialy this change request so I withdraw it.
Nevertheless I think such functinality will be welcomed by many in the future releases.
Comments
Isn't this already possible via one of the following?
The approaches you propose work only when the user is logged-in. This is not our case.
We want to not overwrite the existing data in case users have an empty registration form to fill.
Hi rminkov,
Could you share a bit more about the reasons why you would not want the event registrants to provide their up to date contact information when registering for an event? Why would you favour keeping the contact information up to date manually instead of letting everyone update their own information (which normally is a preferred process since that means less work for organization's staff)? Just curious about the reasons because it's a first time I met with such requirements and it would be interesting to know a bit of a background behind it, to understand how it can benefit others in similar circumstances.
Hi,
We have bad experience with people updating their own data. I honestly do not know why this happens, but it is a fact.
Your post gives me idea though of a way we can circumvent the standart Civi behaviour. Thank you :)
Please take a few minutes to describe the approach you're going to use as that may be helpful for others. Thanks!
We were exposing the actual fields - prefix, Company, Department, Jobtitle - and people were overwriting them all the time. We have problem with this, as we use them to generate participants and other lists.
The idea is not to use in the profile the same fields we need to be proper, but to expose alternative fields - prefix3, Company3, Department3 and Jobtitle3.
The fields First name, Last name and email that are exposed in the profile should be the real fields, otherwise deduplication rule will not work.
People still can enter their names in all caps or small caps, but https://civicrm.org/extensions/capitalisation-corrector will help.
It is very simple approach, I cannot imagine how we didn't think about it sooner :)
I hope this helps.