A common concern we hear with Deduping records is the ability to retain valuable information from the same field across multiple records when merging.
The initial solution for this within DemandTools was the Field Copy Unique Field Rule in Dedupe. Field Copy Unique allows you to take a field from a non-winning record and populate it to an alternate field on the winning Record.
This is where the Combine Field Value steps in. If you use the field copy unique approach to copy the non-winning values to a combinable field type, you will then be given the option to check the combine field value checkbox and combine multiple losing record’s value to the winning record.
FieldCopyUnique: Update the field with a unique value from a selected field
- Designed to auto-populate "alternate" fields. e.g. alternate email or alternate phone fields
- Can only select like field types to copy from, e.g. text field to text field, number field to number field etc.
- ONLY populates the selected field on the winning record with unique values
- The check for uniqueness is done by comparing data in the from field for all duplicate records in the group to the value in the from field on the winning record
- Unique values are then written to the target field
- If there are multiple unique values in the duplicate records, DemandTools will arbitrarily pick which one to keep
- To specify which value to keep when there are multiples, use the FieldCopyUnique Scoring option instead
- If a value currently exists in the target field, it will ONLY update this field if the Overwrite checkbox on the right is selected
- Selecting the FieldCopyUnique option will highlight the Value box in yellow
- Click in the yellow highlight and select the field to copy unique data from
- The selected field will now be shown in the grid
