Inactive Emails and Phones Numbers

John Prangl:

Is there a way to globally delete all inactive phone and email numbers.  I can get them inot a query, know that i want to delete ONLY the inactive ones but can not figure out the next steps

Assuming you are on 7.94+ (I haven't re-read the entire thread here, so forgive me if it's stated there), you will need to use a bit of a workaround.  What you want to do is get your phone numbers and the Phone Import ID in Excel.  Then Import using the Phone Import ID to change the Phone Type for those Phone Records.  Once you have the Phone Numbers in RE with a special Phone Type (I use something like "zDELETE") then you can use the Plug-In which will delete all Phone Records with the Phone Type specified.


To get those Phone Import IDs, however, you need to use (unless there's an option I'm not aware of) the RE Import function to Create an Import File.  I don't recall off hand, and don't have time to look right now, but I think it's easier to just dump all of the records, remove the Phone Numbers that you don't want to edit, and then proceed with cleaning the data that needs to be scrubbed,


If you already have the Phone Numbers in Excel and do not have the Phone Import IDs, you may be a bit stuck...particularly if you have cases where the same Phone Number resides on multiple Constituent Records.


Does this help?  And I'll repeat...test the whole process with just a handful of records until you're comfortable with what you're doing.

I just did this so I'll list my steps while it's fresh. The KB article 95152 outlines this, too. I ran a query of phones with inactive marked.  I exported that query including the phone import ID, phone type, phone number, inactive, comments (didn't need the comments ultimately).  The excel file now has all the phone numbers for the constituents in the query.  Lots were active, some were inactive.  I removed all the active phones being very careful each row stayed intact since that represents a single constituent.  Change the Inactive content FALSE to Delete Me (or whatever you choose).  There are many duplicate phone numbers across families in our database and even within a single constituent records so I used a starting point of 214-111-1111 and then copy+filled so there were consecutive numbers, but no duplicates.  Since I was deleting the phone number, it didn't matter if I changed the number.  This took a little while because the brokenness of the numbers across the spreasheet.  Then import, validating first.  The KB article tells what options to check.  Best practice here is to run this through a test bed or only try a few rows in the import to be sure it works like you want.  The point of the import is to overwrite the phone type with the Delete Me so the plug-in knows what to get rid of.  After you validate and all is well, uncheck the validate box and run it for real.  Be sure to check the exception file and the create query box.  Save the import control report as it lists the names of the exception file and the query.  Then you can run the plug-in.  You'll have to have everyone out of the database, but it should only take a few minutes.  The only option you have in the plug-in is which phone type to delete.  It doesn't give any kind of report or message telling you it is finished, which is stupid.  That's it.  It is kind of a big deal if you don't do this sort of work in the database regularly.  I wish you well!