Saturday, January 24, 2009

Siebel Vanilla Merge Records functionality

A very simple way to eliminate the duplicate records from the database without loosing any of the child entities information, is available in Siebel as a Vanilla process which is known as “Merge Records”.

It is available as a Menu-item in application level Menu -> Edit -> Merge Records.

Merge Record process can handle records at one time, I have tried merging around 50 records and it worked fine for me, not sure what is the maximum limit but I don’t think we will ever need more than this in live scenario.

The point to be noted while doing merge records is that the record you select last will become the destination record while all other selected records will behave as a source record. So, after the completion of Merge Records process, you will see only one record on the UI, which you have selected last and rest all the records will get merged into that.

Now, lets see what a Merge Records process can do and what it can’t?

What it can do and cannot do?
1. All the child records of the source records will get merge into the child records of the destination record, with the exception of duplicate records. That means, if you are merging two Opportunity records, then Opportunity Product records of source will get merge into the destination one. Similarly for Contacts, Attachments, Activities etc etc…

2. Merge Records process never touches any of the field on the destination record. All the field values remains untouched.

3. In a nutshell, we can say that it copies all the records of the source records, which are associated via link (One-to-Many Link or Many-to-Many Link), to the destination record. For eg : While applying merge records on two Opportunity records will copy the Sales Team of the source to destination.

Lets take an example of two Opportunities. Details of Opportunity records is mentioned below along with the child records details.

Opportunity Source Record
Oppty Name : Source Oppty
Account : Avatar
Contacts Associated : Ed Holden, Jason Rubin, David Schmidt
Products Associated : Bluetooth PC Card, Bluetooth PC Card II, Bluetooth USB Adapter
Sales Team : Paul Mason, Siebel Administrator, Sam Moss

Opportunity Destination Record
Oppty Name : Destination Oppty
Account : Avaya
Contacts Associated : Laura Abate, Jason Rubin, Robert Abel
Products Associated : Bluetooth USB Adapter, Bluetooth USB Adapter II
Sales Team : Siebel Administrator, Sandy Meizen



After Merge Records
Oppty Name : Destination Oppty
Account : Avaya
Contacts Associated : Laura Abate, Jason Rubin, Robert Abel, Ed Holden, David Schmidt
Products Associated : Bluetooth USB Adapter, Bluetooth USB Adapter II, Bluetooth PC Card, Bluetooth PC Card II
Sales Team : Siebel Administrator, Sandy Meizen, Paul Mason, Sam Moss



check it out !!!!!!!!!!

2 comments:

  1. Hi Gaurav,

    Is there a way to retain few fields from the source record and merge/copy it to the destination record?
    Eg, If there's a flag checked on the source record, then this flag should retain the value after the merge in the destination record.

    Just wondering if this is achievable?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anyway to restrict one child object from merge?

    ReplyDelete