Global Copy error with tables even with "automatically add table entries" checked

Rebecca Moore

Hi everyone,

In our database, our Nickname field is a Table field, and when I manually enter a new constituent it lets me add a new nickname to the table if it is not a table entry already. However, when I try to globally copy First Name to Nickname, with "automatically add table entries" checked, it gives me the error "[X] is an inactive table entry, you must reactivate it if you wish to select it" even though [X] is not a table entry yet. All the guides I've read say to make the entry active again for it to work but we don't have the entry in the first place, we're trying to add it. Does this happen if your field is a Lookup*? Or is this happening because I chose global copy instead of global add?


*I don't have permission yet to look in the Fields section so I can't see if Nickname is a lookup, but I suspect it might be.

Alan French

Yes this'll be because the field is a lookup, not because of the copy option. If you chose add, you'd have to add the exact same nickname to each record.


I've often had that error message but it's always because it does actually exist in the table, I've never been told that something's an inactive entry when that's not the case. Are you 100% sure it's not in the table already? The table entries aren't necessarily in alphabetical order so it might not be in the position in the list that you expect it to be in.


Despite the difficulty we have with keeping our nickname field tidy, personally I'd rather have it as free text than a lookup and then this error wouldn't appear at all. If your first name field isn't a lookup and that's where the nicknames are coming from, there doesn't seem to be any benefit to having nickname as a lookup.

Rebecca Moore

Alan French:

Yes this'll be because the field is a lookup, not because of the copy option. If you chose add, you'd have to add the exact same nickname to each record.


I've often had that error message but it's always because it does actually exist in the table, I've never been told that something's an inactive entry when that's not the case. Are you 100% sure it's not in the table already? The table entries aren't necessarily in alphabetical order so it might not be in the position in the list that you expect it to be in.


Despite the difficulty we have with keeping our nickname field tidy, personally I'd rather have it as free text than a lookup and then this error wouldn't appear at all. If your first name field isn't a lookup and that's where the nicknames are coming from, there doesn't seem to be any benefit to having nickname as a lookup.

Thank you. I haven't checked all of them to see if they are already in the table, but last week when I tried this the first time I did not find "Tracey" in the table. Then later I was manually adding a new constituent with that nickname, so it was added to the table. When I tried global copy again today, "Tracey" worked but the others got the same error. 


Will this same thing happen if I use import instead?


I also don't see the benefit of nickname as a lookup, but I'm new and the only one who wants to look into this right now and I don't have enough permissions yet to really work on it so I was hoping that "automatically add table entries" would be a workaround for now. 


Thanks!