Addressees and Salutations

Jane Van Ingen

Hello.


I am tasked with cleaning up addressees and salutations at my new job. I've used RE in the past, but not recently. I cleaned up addressees and salutations at an earlier job by exporting the data, changing it, and re-importing it, and I presumed I would do the same here.


Upon looking at configuration, I saw a lot of miscellaneous names--see enclosed image. When I tried to delete one of them, I was told I couldn't delete it because it was in one or more records. How does this happen--when someone clicks on "editable"?


I want to find out the root cause of the problem before I develop a plan to clean it up.


Thank you,

Jane


Jane Van Ingen

Alan French

Wow. There was a post last year on the RE Facebook group asking for examples of "the most baffling thing you've ever seen in an inherited database" and I think this would have been a strong contender ?


I don't think that would've happened by clicking "editable", as we have a bunch of editable salutations on records and not one of them appears in our salutation list like that! I also don't think it could have been done by an import gone wrong since imports require the salutation ID, not the actual text of the salutation, but I haven't imported salutations very often so I may be wrong. As far as I'm aware, the only way that could've been done is by someone going into Configuration and actually adding the name to the list. If you've restricted users' access to Configuration then that should prevent it from happening again.


Salutations can be a pain to clean up as they lurk in all sorts of places, like non-constituent relationships, but since you've cleaned them up once before I guess you're already painfully familiar with that. Best of luck tracking them all down!

Karen Diener

I agree with Alan.  This falls into the "right when you think you've seen it all" category for sure!


Addressees and salutations hide in a lot of places:

If one of those options was selected for an add/sal and then the add/sal was marked "editable", it could still "exist" in the database.

It could be on a relationship

It could be used as a nametag selection in an event participant's record


Those are the first three places to check that come to mind.  You would have to set up a query to look for the entry of "Bob" in any of those fields, correct it, then move on to the next one.  After an add/sal doesn't exist on any records, you should be able to delete it from Configuration.


Good luck!  This looks like a possibly lengthy project, but might be perfect if you're quarantined at home.  And there can be great satisfaction in incremental yet noticeable / tangible progress!!


Karen

Austen Brown

I agree with everything said above. A user would have had to go into Configuration and manually create new Add/Sal configurations with constituent's names - marking Add/Sals as editable on a record does not have this result.  I recommend to start with you create a constituent query that pulls in every constituent that has one of these configurations on their constituent record, relationship record, etc. and then narrow down the field from there into more manageable sections.  Best of luck on this clean-up project! 

Christine Cooke

It's either an "editable" or it is located in one of the several Add/Sal locations, not just the constituent, there are all of the relationships which each have their own add/sal

Dariel Dixon

I'm glad you shared this.  I don't mean to laugh at your pain, but I will admit that I giggled out loud when I saw this.  We've all been there before though.


I think I disagree with Alan French‍.  I think this might have been an import gone wrong.   Or a rogue employee.  Either way, they shouldn't be there.  I would check the properties of the record that one of these salutations is on, and see if there is a pattern.  Maybe all created on the same date by the same user?  


Either way, this is something that brightened up my Friday.  Hopefully it won't be too much of a pain to clean up.

Jane Van Ingen

Hello everyone.


Thank you for all of the great suggestions and ideas as to why the addressees and salutations got messed up.


I am going to use the global change feature to get rid of the bad salutations and addressees, and then create the generic ones for each. So for addressee, it should be title, first name and last name. And for salutation, it should be title, first name and last name.


Thanks again.


Jane

Barbara Schlichter

I think you should also add suffix to both addressee/salutations.  For Salutation I think it should be Title, Last Name.


Barbara