Hi,

Thought I'd try posting in the forum on this one to see if anyone else has any insights...

I have a constituent attribute called "Alumni Network" that is able to be added multiple times to a constituent record (ie, it's non-unique): so I could have multiple instances for this attribute category for a single constituent record, eg:

Category           Description  Date

Alumni Network  A               1/1/2016

Alumni Network  B               1/2/2016

I'd like to remove all instances of this attribute category from a constituent record, but leave any instances of other attribute categories alone.

In an earlier version of ImportOmatic (v2.x) I could previously achieve this by having a file that specified the Category, Description, and the special "Remove" field with a value of "Remove".

However, in the latest version of ImportOmatic (v3.x) it looks as though I also must include the Date as well - even though I don't care about matching on Date, I just want all instances of the attribute category removed... I really don't want to have to include the Date, because I won't actually have access to its current value in RE (the data being imported is coming from another system, plus the Date could have been updated by an admin in RE in the meantime anyway). The ImportOmatic documentation seems to indicate that all I need for a match is Category & Description, but it's still including Date behind the scenes even though I'm not specifying it in the file & there's no option to include / exclude Date in the matching criteria in the import profile...

Has anyone encountered anything similar in a 3.x version of ImportOmatic?

Thanks so much for any assistance,

Dave

Hi Dave,

I tried to delete constituent attributes using the V3 of IOM and wasn't successful, interesting to note you need to match the date exact? That's annoying as like you we have system generated dates on our attributes.

A way around your issue, which we use, may be to export all ID's and Attribute details of what you want to delete, to create an import that will remove (that way you have a date of the attribute you want to delete).

We use this in the way that we have 1 Attribute category, and many options in Description for the same category that i want to delete each month.

To bulk delete them, I export the ID, and import the same description to all records which overrides whats on the record, ie "delete" or "cleanup" and then run an RE Global change to delete the attribute. Its a long way round but beats doing it manually or doing multiple attribute change/delete runs

hope that helps.

Thanks Erin, good (well, not, but you know...) to hear that I'm not the only one with this issue.

In our scenario we're trying to automate everything, so unfortunately using the in-built RE functions isn't an option for us.

I had thought that as a last resort we could use an ImportOmatic export profile to automate exporting the current set of attributes (including the Date) for all constituents, then use this to feed in to our process that creates the import file then including the Date. Although it's technically possible and I'm sure would work, it's a fair bit of effort (& clunkiness) to work around behaviour that's seemingly in conflict with the IOM documentation.

I've also logged a support ticket for this one, I'll made sure I feed back what I learn from that but thought others like you might also have faced this challenge.

This is a bug and the documentation reflects how it is supposed to work. Unfortunately the fix for this will not be in the next upcoming release. It will be in a following patch. Thank you for bringing this to our attention.

Thanks Nic, are you able to advise any timeframe for the patch this fix will be contained in? This will help inform our options for moving ahead.

We are aiming to have the patch that would include this fix at the end of the month.

That's awesome news, thanks Nic! We'll stay posted!