Name format issue

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Posted on by maustin

I have an issue when searching for names in Contacts. The majority of the names were imported, with the format of "Last name, First name". Dynamics name formatting was set to "First name Last Name". Plus there were quite a few names that did not have name but " ,. ", first name " , " and last name " . " Then new records have been added since with the "First name Last name" format. I have 2 questions,

1. Will this effect the consistency in search results?

2. How can I format existing records to match the systems selected format rule?

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felipegs 95 on at

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I'll try to answer your questions based on what I understood:

Yes, only if your quick search view is configured based only on the fullname column, as you now, fullname is a composite attribute and is formed with Firstname, Lastname or other attributes depending on the Settings->System settings->General->Fullname format configuration. So if you don't have Firstname and Lastname included in your view, your not going to have any results when you look for a contact.

Since you cannot overwrite fullname field, I would suggest a work around:

Create a new attribute to backup the lastname, por example 'new_bklastname'

Create and execute a workflow that copy 'lastname' value to 'new_bklastname' and clear 'lastname' value

Create and execute a workflow that copy back the 'new_bklastname' value to 'lastname' value

Your fullname must be refreshed as the CRM setting formatting says

Finally you can delete the 'new_bklastname' attribute from the entity.

Hope this helps.

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Aric Levin - MVP 30,190 Moderator on at

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Hi,

Changes that you apply to the Full Name format are only applied to modifications of records after the change has been performed and not to existing records.

If you have 100 records with First Name Last Name format, and you make the change, only the new names that you add will have the Last Name, First Name format.

Saying that, there are still options. When you make a change to the first or last name fields for an existing contact, it will also modify the full name to use the new Full Name System Setting that you applied.

If you need to make a bulk change to a lot of name, I can suggest to do that programmatically or maybe using an SSIS package with KingswaySoft Connector for CRM.

You can retrieve all the names that you want to make changes to based on full name format. If your old setting was First Name Last Name, you can retrieve the name using the Query where Full Name does not contains ','.

After your retrieve the names, add a known character to the end of the of the Last Name field (such as a number, or punctuation). That will modify all the first name and last names fields.

Do this a second time, but this time run it using a query where last name ends with the punctuation that you added, and remove that character from your last name field.

This should solve the issue for you.

Not the easy solution that you would expect, but this will work.

Good luck.

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ashlega 34,477 on at

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Hi,

I am pretty sure (though you may want to try) that you can simply create an ondemand workflow for the contact entity that will put contact's "last name" into the last name field. Then run that workflow for all the contacts where fullname needs to be updated. Strange as it sounds, but that will still achieve just the same result - even though, essentially, nothing will change for the first/last names.. fullname will still be re-calculated according to the new rules since those rules will kick in on the "update" of the lastname field.

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