Merge operator and Participant Queries- ALERT!!!!

Elaine Tucker

Did you know that if you take two participant queries and do ANY type of merge operation your results will be zero? I recently opened a case with Blackbaud because I was subtracting one particpant query from another and the numbers remained the same.  I KNEW there were participants in the 1st query who should be removed - hence the call to support.


Here is their response:

Hello Elaine!

Thank you so much for allowing me time to work in Sample in regards to our failing SUB merge. I did discover the problem.
Query didn't subtract folks who had been to both events because it sees them as different records. Even though the constituent is the same, because the event is different, it will never subtract anyone. I tested it on a few different queries, and always came up with the same results we saw last week. ....

As a RE user, I know that I used to do merge queries all the time for particpants but could not prove it because we have so many participant queries that I clean my queries out when I am done with them...

So my  question is  - why have the merge funcationality available when you are in participant query if it is NOT going to work.


 

Alan French

Actually that's exactly how I would have expected it to work - a participant record is an instance of a single constituent attending a single event. I'd only expect records to be subtracted if a constituent's attendance at a specific event was in both queries.


Can you not get the desired result by using constituent queries instead, and specifying the event for each under the "Event Participations" node?

Elaine Tucker

We have some participants who are not constituents - our work around is to have all the criteria in one participant query,

I was just shocked when I found this out - have been using RE for over 20 years now....