Globally Deleting Aliases

Noah Wilson · March 10

I'm looking at some cleanup of our database and have a large amount of aliases that we could remove. The ideal solution would be to globally delete them. However, to my knowledge, no such functionality exists. I was wondering what other people have done to avoid the line-by-line approach? Thank you for any insight you can provide! (Also, apologies if this post is in the incorrect location; still getting used to the new interfaces.)

Sunshine Reinken Watson · March 10

Idea: Try exporting them and import them back in as blank values (use the caret character ^ in that field) under a specific type. Then delete the type.

Joe Moretti · March 10

Personally, I would just leave them as is. It doesn't hurt the system having them there.

Karen Diener · March 11

I'm torn between Sunshine and Joe's responses!

I lean toward cleaning them up, only because this - to me - is clutter that often causes confusion and distraction for staff. If her suggestion works - which I think it should - then go for it. Test on a small group of maybe 5 records first. Note that you'll need to use import to change the type and then global change to delete Aliases with that type.

If Sunshine's suggestion doesn't work and you do not have third-party tools that might be able to help (Omatic, for instance) then you might have to leave them there.

Devan Bessinger · March 11

I'm with you @Noah Wilson. I have some that need to be cleaned up. Previously, we had to store the ID number from a different system in the Aliases to make some integration work properly (so it's just an ID number, not even a name), and now we don't even use that other system. I would love to clean that data out, but I can't seem to find a way. I tried the import route, but it will only let you import new Aliases. For some reason, it will not allow you to update existing Aliases. So for now, we're just stuck with the clutter. If you discover a trick to get rid of them, let me know. Good luck!

Carlene Johnson · March 11

If you are an Importacular client you would have access to Alias Deleter by Zeidman Development. I'm tagging @David Zeidman to chime in as I'm curious if this functionality is also available in the cloud version of Importacular as the link I provided references the database view version.

Worth looking into!

Noah Wilson · March 13

Thank you all for the informative and insightful responses! @Sunshine Reinken Watson That's using RE's baked-in import feature, right? I didn't know that the caret returned a blank, that've very useful! I'll look into testing out your proposed 1-2 combo and see how that goes. Thank you very much! The good thing about this situation is that, as @Joe Moretti noted, they aren't doing any particular harm. This is mostly just trying to chip away at cleanup efforts, so we're not up against any hard deadline.

Noah Wilson · March 26

Apologies for the delay in replying back here. I did some looking and testing and it turns out that the import function baked into RE does not support changing Aliases, only adding them. (For example the import template doesn't have a place for the Alias Import ID.) I still need to look and see if something like ImportOmatic might be able to replace a specific Alias description with a blank field.

Carlene Johnson · March 26

https://community.blackbaud.com/discussion/comment/312238#Comment_312238

@Amy Barker - tagging you in on this topic!

Amy Barker · March 27

Hi Noah!

Great to talk to you earlier. :)

We can't use Omatic Cloud to do this yet. But we could either replace the Alias Value with something easy to find and do a global delete in database view. Or potentially there is another way around this, but we will have to experiment a bit. Let's tackle this when we meet at some point! There might be a way we could work with this using IOM.

Noah Wilson · March 30

@Amy Barker Thank you very much for the clarification! It seems like the key piece is the alias description. It is possible to globally delete the alias type via the global change function, but that leaves behind the description with no type. Looking forward to seeing what we can come up with to address this!

Globally Deleting Aliases

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