Dinner Preferences Download to Wrong Place from Online Express

Nancy Hartman

I just spoke with support about why the Dinner Preference report will not run.  The rep told me that the dinner preferences need to be loaded under more information for each participant.  The online express registration form downloads the data into an Attribute.  Why is there a disconnect on where dinner preferences go?  It would be great if the systems were  connected in a more useful way.

Steph Williams

Did you set a new attribute for the meal choices when you created the event form?


We rarely use the canned event reports, so for us - I just made a simple tweak to our query that we use for meals. 

Tatianna Peck

Steph Williams:

Did you set a new attribute for the meal choices when you created the event form?


We rarely use the canned event reports, so for us - I just made a simple tweak to our query that we use for meals. 

I can see this as a viable solution, but it does create clutter and duplicate fields - definitely one of my peeves as a DB Admin!  Is the word still out on whether or not they plan to link the existing dinner preference field to Online Express forms?  Or, better yet, if there is currently a means to do so that we have missed?

Faith Murray

It is an "Inconvenient Truth" that ALL fields on an online Event form will download into the Participant Attributes. This goes for arrival date/time, seating preferences, dietary preferences, or any other field besides basic name and contact info. Attributes acts as the catch where new data is dumped. To accomodate this sytem, you will need to establish a routine, where you either pull your data straight from Attributes through a Query/Export method, or else you routinely transfer data from Attributes to the other data tabs on the Participant record.


We save time and just Query our data from Attributes. We don't like double entry either. The one exception is we will transfer seating preferences, so it shows up in the Seating Wizard when we assign tables.

Tatianna Peck

What a HUGE bummer!  Oh well...maybe they'll change it someday.  Thanks for the information!