Microsoft Dynamics CRM Duplicate Consolidation Management

After receiving a comment on last month’s post I decided to do a follow-up and detail a little further how Microsoft Dynamics CRM manages the merging of duplicate records.  For the purposes of this post I’ll stick to using Contacts as the example.  However, the same is true for Accounts and many other tables. 

For our sample records let’s say we have just two contacts that are duplicates.  Contact A has four service calls associated with it.  Each of these service calls have relevant data that you want to retain.  Contact B has three service calls associated with it and each service call has data that needs to be retained.

Upon merging Contact A with Contact B (so in this case B is the keeper record), there will be seven service calls associated with Contact B.  This is accomplished through the use of three data elements in each Contact transaction. These fields are MasterID, Merged, and Statecode. 

Merged is an indicator field where 1 indicates that the transaction is indeed merged.  Statecode is another indicator field indicating active and inactive transactions.  In Dynamics a statecode of value of 1 is inactive and 0 is active.  Yes, you read that right.  Zero is active. 

 The magic of the duplicate consolidation lies in the MasterID field.  For consolidated records the MasterID is equal to the unique identifier of the keeper record.  So in our example if the unique identifier of Contact B was 1234, the MasterID of  Contact A will be 1234.  The Merged field would be 1 and Statecode of 1.  This allows all associated transactions of Contact A to be “realigned” to Contact B without having to perform massive updates to many tables.  The MasterID functions as a re-pointer for all related transactions associated to the merged record.  So there are no changes to the related transactions.  The re-pointer directs all transactions related to the non-keeper record to the new keeper record.

For those transactions which are not merged the MasterID is NULL (no need to store the unique identifier twice).