I have been experiencing a number of issues with registering guests through online express. My organization households record, so typically the male spouse will be the primary constituent and the female spouse will be linked to this record, but not actually have any record of her own. It has made event sign ups confusing.
Our form is set up like this - you choose how many guests are attending from a drop down list then fill in the required contact information that pops up below under Guest #1, then Guest #2, and so on. One issue that arises is anyone who registers after Guest #1 on the same form, will be registered to the event as a “guest of” Guest #1. This prevents them from being linked to their own record if they are a constituent unless done manually by creating a duplicate participant record.
Another issue that has been coming up with this arises when the female or non-primary constituent in a household registers as Guest #1, which happens quite often. Let's say our record is for John and Sarah, with John being the primary record and Sarah's being linked as a spouse without her own record. If Sarah registers them for an event, she will register herself as Guest #1, then scroll down and register John as Guest #2. When downloading this transaction in OLX, we link it to John's record and reject the updates to his record that want to change his name to Sarah.
Then, in the event record, the registrations get messed up. Since we linked the record to John, and rejected the update to change his name to Sarah, the event participation lists John being registered twice. It is possible to fix all of this manually, but for a large event, that is not nearly efficient enough.
Another question related to this is the issue of non-primary constituents registering for events without their primary constituent counterpart. If only the spouse (Sarah) registers, then in order to link the records, we would have to change it say the primary constituent name (John) is registered. Then we have to manually enter in the spouse somehow, which again is inefficient. Is there a way to mark event participation for just a spouse when records are householded like this?
