It is possible to import phones and email addresses on to constituent records so that they either create a new record or update an existing one. In this article, for simplicity, we refer to both phones and emails as "phones" but the same applies to both.
From RE 7.96 Blackbaud introduced functionality that would prevent duplicate type and number combinations from saving and optionally prevent duplicate phone types from appearing on records. This meant that on importing data if an additional phone type and number were to be added, RE would reject the save and cause an exception.
In Importacular there are match settings that allow you to determine whether or not you should add a new record or update an existing record as shown below:
In the example above if there is a match on the type and number then Importacular will update any other values associated with the phone e.g. comments etc. If type is not selected as below:
then a match on number will update the type and comments etc.
What happens if there is no match?
Normally Importacular would add a new phone to the constituent. However, there are also business rules set up that may prevent this as shown by the red triangle warning symbol.
As we said earlier, RE prevents duplicate type and number but whether or not a duplicate type alone will be prevented is set up in the business rules shown below:
If the business rules are set up to "Save record anyway" then this is not a problem. We are able to import a phone that has the same type as an existing.
If the business rules are set up to either "Do not allow record to be saved" or "Display warning" then the records will be rejected. (Unfortunately the Blackbaud API does not treat the "Display Warning" any differently from the "Do not allow record to be saved" which we regard as a bug in RE).