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Dynamics 365 Community / Forums / Customer experience | Sales, Customer Insights,... / Duplicate Detection Ru...
Customer experience | Sales, Customer Insights,...
Suggested Answer

Duplicate Detection Rule 2 seperate fields

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Posted on by TedW 479

Hi,

Hoping you can help on this.

We use a Live Chat client (ProProfs) which generates Cases and Contacts within Dynamics 365.

A large number of our Contacts would have 2 email address,  Email Address 1 & Email Address 2.

However, if one of our existing Contacts uses the Live Chat system using their Email address 2 a new Contact is created each time, because only the email address 1 field is looked for when matching the Contact.

This had lead a huge amount of new and redundant contacts being created.

I have spoken with ProProfs and they say that its an issue within Dynamics.

My problem is that our developers tell me that its an issue with ProProfs.

Is there anything that can be done within Dynamics to resolve this? Is it possible to create a Duplicate detection rule to check 1 field against an another, or would I need to go down a different route?

Thanks as always

Ted

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  • Suggested answer
    Miguel Lourenco Profile Picture
    Miguel Lourenco Microsoft Employee on at

    Hi,

    you can always create a plugin that triggers on the pre create of the contact that will check if a contact with "email 1" or "email 2" already exists. If yes, stops, otherwise continues.

  • TedW Profile Picture
    TedW 479 on at

    Many thanks for your reply Miguel. I'm not a developer, but have spoken with one  of our team and he didnt think that your suggestion would work for us as it would likely cause issues for the case creation. He suspect it might mean that the cases don’t get created at all when that happens (an error would be thrown because the “Creator” field references a lookup to a contact that cannot be found)

    Thanks again

    Ted

  • David Jennaway Profile Picture
    David Jennaway 14,065 on at

    Unfortunately the OOB duplicate detection rules won't work, as they cannot check different fields 

    You could go a bit further with the plugin logic. One approach that you could take is to have a plugin fire on the synchronous Post Operation stage of the create of a contact that:

    • Checks if there is a matching existing contact, based on the respective email fields
    • If there is a match, change the Id OutputParameter to be the contactid if the existing contact. This will mean that the calling code would think it has created a new contact, but actually receives the id of the existing contact
    • A new contact will still be created (you can't stop this, without the calling code getting an error), but the plugin could deactivate the new contact record, and/or set a flag field, and you could use a bulk deletion job to clear up the data. Or, you could create an addition asynchronous plugin step to delete the new record  

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