Hi everyone.
So, here's how the 'Add Contacts' mechanism works, but first I start by saying that I'm not to repeat all the tests I made, I'll only quote those significant to clear the statement I'm going to make, then you can go ahead by doing all your own tests, just be sure you'll meet my results and further validate my statement. And another preface: the following conclusion valid for the 'Add Contacts' mechanism does not allow you to make a similar conclusion for the 'Reduce Contacts', a mechanism that I tested not to work as you would expect given how the 'Add Contacts' one works.
Statement-Conclusion: 'Add Contacts' works like a UNION statement in the SQL standard language, that is it adds together the records from two or more different sets without including duplicate records: all the sets are merged together avoiding repetitions. Like in the UNION standard SQL statement, 'Add Contacts' adds together only consistent items like all contacts are: they all have the same attributes and data types (thay have a contact name, a company name if they are companies ... etc).
But mind: what this UNION unites are not the results of SELECT queries, 'Add Contacts'/UNION unites just the total amounts of the answers in a Profile Questionnaire that we are going to add together by the 'Add ...' mechanism: these totals are not results of SELECT queries, yet they are treated as such and therefore it's convenient to our comprehension to think of them like that.
The tests I quote to demonstrate the conclusion are made on the Cronus example db:
If you open the PERSONA profile questionnaire you'll read there are 151 men, 96 women and 9, 3 women and 6 men who took a master or a PhD.
Now if in a Segment you add, say, first the 'Hombre' together with the 'Master/ Doctor' (it's Spanish because I'm using a Spanish version of Navision, I guess it'll do something like men and Master/ Phd in English; there is really a space between the slash / and D of Doctor) as 'answer' in the 'Where' and 'And' of the Contact Profile Answer tab (you can avoid to use the Where to specify that the Profile Questionnaire Code has to be PERSONA, as well as you could need to add the 'Master/ Doctor' answer only on second act, that is after you added first the 'Hombre' answer, I didn't understand clearly how this works exactly, but it's of lesser importance now, just look at the No. of Criteria Actions in the Segment window and see if it writes 1 or 2, meaning that in a case it added only one answer, while in the other it added both) then you'll get 154 rows, because among the 9 M/PhD there are 6 men who are already present in the list of 151 'Hombre's so the 'Add Contacts' mechanism adds to 151 only 9-6=3 other items, the three women who took the M/PhD; addition without repetitions.
Then you decide to add to this first result the list of 96 women, and here the 'Add Contacts' mechanism realizes that 3 women in the result of the first UNION are already present in the list of 96, so it adds only 96-3=93 to 154 which will add up to 247.
You can change the order of the addendums to anything you may write, Mujer+Hombre+Master/ Doctor or Master/ Doctor+Hombre+Women or Women+Master/ Doctor+Hombre ... etc , and fortunately the total amount is always the same, 247.
Now, as I brought it forward the 'Reduce Contacts' mechanism DOES NOT work like the MINUS statement in the SQL language, you can easily see it by reducing the 247 total amount by the 9 M/PhD holders and expecting to get 238, while you'll have 206 instead.
The functionality of 'Reduce Contacts'is the goal of a next set of tests, and wasn't the purpose of my original question, which was really focused on the 'Add Contacts' feature only. So, please, have the patience to wait more days till I'll have the time to figure it out (maybe I'll never have the will besides the occasion, the time will tell, so I strongly invite you to investigate).
In the meanwhile thank you all for your kind attention.
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