re: What to do with Attributes you no longer use

Janice Price-VanDyke — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 14:29:20 GMT

I think this is a great move forward but does not address the issue of selectively removing an attribute from some but not all records that have it. I thought I would pass on this eureka moment I thought you might like to pass onto other users. First, I am a hosted client so I don't have visibility to our database (or this would not be such a big deal!).

Here is the scenario - to make it easy for my users to query on those celebrating reunions in the upcoming years I mark a constituent attribute of reunion cycle. In the desc I put the reunion (25th, 60th, etc), In the comments I put a mention of their gift cycle (we count gifts for 2 years prior to the reunion in their total) and in the data I put the first date of that weekend (we do it over memorial day weekend). So I have more than one year going at one time.

The problem comes at cleanup time. I have to pull out one year (about 8000+ constituents!) and put in another. Easy, you are probably saying, just pull out all the data to an extract, delete all entries, nuke the attribute, recreate it and import wanted into. Ah, but then all of the queries my users have setup are now going to reference a not-existing attribute and they will have to fix them when they go to run them. Ring! I can hear my phoning ringing off the hook.

I think I just discovered another method - I pull the data, including the import id, of those who have attributes I want to delete. I created a dummy attribute like 'reunion to delete'. Do an import update on those records and change the category to 'reunion to delete', run a global delete on that. Then I import or globally mark the new batch of reunions and I am done.

Funny how your mind wanders as you are hand-deleting data! Hope this helps others!

re: What to do with Attributes you no longer use

Kevin Brunson — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 19:53:19 GMT

Jo, great question and I'm glad you asked.

The upgrade process will designate all existing attributes in the database as 'Active'. Once you are on version 7.85, any newly added attributes will need to be manually 'activated'.

re: What to do with Attributes you no longer use

Jo Ward — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 19:23:19 GMT

You say "On the Attributes page, mark the checkbox in the new Active column for each attribute to appear as available in Records. If you do not mark this checkbox, the attribute is inactive."

This seems to say that all attributes will, by default, be inactive, and that positive action must be taken to make it active. Is this really what will happen, or will the upgrade automatically populate the new Active column with a check mark, and only new attributes would need to be manually activated?

News You Can Use: Marking Attributes Inactive

re: What to do with Attributes you no longer use

re: What to do with Attributes you no longer use

re: What to do with Attributes you no longer use