prevent ceation od duplicate customer/vendor/contact NAV 4

dlauwers

Hi,

I am new to Navision development :-s and would like to know if it is standard possible to prevent the user in creating a duplicate customer/vendor or contact when more than x% of the fields are the same.

I found a feature in the settings of sales where you can enter some settings that handle duplicates in customers/vendor/contacts. But it does not prevent me in entering a customer/vendor/contact twice. It will warn you, but it will not block it. The user still has the option of creating duplicates. Users faster click on buttons without reading the content, and before you know your database is full with duplicate vendor info because it is entered by 2 different persons.

Can someone guide me what I have to change in order to prevent this so that the user never can enter duplicate records. Maybe always showing the duplicate record window is a acceptable option ?

Thanx for your time
Danny

Miklos_Hollender

Here is a nice simple algorithm for it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenshtein_distance

Miklos_Hollender

But be warned that there is a reason why Navision does not prevent it. For example, would you prevent saving the company name Macrosoft? Only one characters away from Microsoft and there still are quite some companies of this name, just Google it. And on the other hand if you would only prevent perfect matches, then what about somebody try saving Mcrosoft mis-typed?

I don't think it's possible to solve this problem on a technical way. On the other hand there is a simple organization change that solves it: allow entering new customers/vendors to one and only one person, to an assistant (and of course havin someone else in reserve as a backup) and kick his/her ass each time the duplicate detection batch job shows valid duplicates.

ara3n

Miklos Hollender

take a look at Contact fuzzy logic that searches for contacts in navision. Users can search for names in there before creating the contact. and it actually searches for contacts even if you have typos.


As for dlauwers, my guess you need to change the message box to Error so it stops the user?

JedrzejT

Quickly advice : use vat registration number as "No." in those tables. With this you never insert 2 times the same customer.

Miklos_Hollender

Hihihi. We've done that for a client about two years ago. But the problem was that about 30 customers who we migrated from the legacy system had no VAT Reg. No. entered so we programatically changed those to DUMMY001 - DUMMY-030 in order to have a unique primary key.

Guess what I saw when I logged onto their system a year after going live? Hundreds of new DUMMYXXX records...

ara3n

Miklos That a funny story.

I guess if you leave a way for people to work around something, they will find it.

dlauwers

Thanks for the advice !!