Partner Merge

Several reasons for merging partners:

• sometimes an identical partner is created twice in the system.
• people get married, and 2 partners become one partner of class FAMILY

Issues with 2.x solution:

• Data was changed in the whole database, eg. donor keys of gifts etc
• Undo when merging by mistake is very difficult, could only be done manually
• difficult to do an audit on the data

Proposal:

• add a database field to the partner table to make the merged partner point to the main partner
• hide the merged partner in the find screens, and only show the main partner
• make reports aware of merged partners
• undo is much easier

Another thought about the proposal:

• for more complex situations, we would need a new table, p_merged_partner, with primary key consisting of partner key and duplicate partner key.

• other proposal:
  • save original partner in blob for unmerge?
  • store update sql statements for reverse? dangerous?