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Angus_McCann1
Angus_McCann1
New Participant
October 12, 2020
Question

Losing Custom Objects in Record Merge

  • October 12, 2020
  • 1 reply
  • 6199 views

Hey all,

 

We use Custom Objects to log a) both the information existing on a person's online account as well as b) recording purchase history in our Marketo DB. However, due to some integrations we on occasion get duplicate email addresses in our system and have to merge the two records - sometimes via the UI, sometimes our Dev team does it programmatically through an API.

 

One thing that we noticed is that when we Merge Record A (existing record w/ Custom Objects) into Record B (new record w/o Custom Objects), the new "Merged Record B" does not have the Custom Objects in the UI. Additionally, when the Dev team looks into our Marketo DB to find the Custom Objects, they can see the Custom Objects.


Things of note:

  • We are integrated into our Salesforce instance, so the "Salesforce Record" that has to be the winning record in a merge is not necessary the "original" record with Custom Objects
  • Our Custom Objects link field & dedupe field is the "Customer ID" (which is tied to the email address & exists as an attribute on the record AND custom object) for the Profile Custom Object, but for purchase custom objects, we also have "Purchase ID" as a de-dupe field (which is an attribute on the Custom Object and only the Custom Object)

 

So when I'm looking at a Merged record, on the record I do not see the Custom Object. Also, nothing gets returned when searching for that record in a Smart List "Email Address is  ____ & Has Custom Object = True". However, the API can still find all the Custom Object exist in Marketo for a specific Customer ID. Anyone have any experience with this / handling Custom Objects when doing a merge operation and making sure they aren't lost?

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1 reply

SanfordWhiteman
SanfordWhiteman
New Participant
October 12, 2020

Easy(ish) to do when merging using the API: can get the linked Custom Objects and reassign them.

 

Using the UI, I'm not aware of a way to do this.

Angus_McCann1
Angus_McCann1Author
New Participant
October 12, 2020

But when the Custom Object is linked to / deduped against the Customer ID, shouldn't we in theory not need to relink it?

SanfordWhiteman
SanfordWhiteman
New Participant
October 12, 2020

That field isn't a guaranteed unique identifier. You can think of it as being like Email Address in that way. A CO with a Link field to <sandy@example.com> doesn't automatically migrate over to another <sandy@example.com> if the first lead is removed.

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