Intro: SDK Support for Duplicate Detection in Titan
Okay, so now you all know that Titan is bringing a cool new feature for you to deal with all the duplicate, unwanted data in your system. Thanks to this much awaited feature, you can now setup duplicate detection rules, and you can use the online duplicate detection for stopping those ever so painful, potentially duplicate records from entering into the system. And if that’s not enough, you can also run the powerful system wide duplicate detection for keeping the system cleaner and garbage-free, more than it ever was! What more can one ask for?
But this is not the only thing duplicate detection has to offer. Underneath a strong Out-Of-Box (OOB) support for duplicate detection, lies an extremely powerful SDK support. In other words, not only can you do all what is there OOB but can make use of this comprehensive SDK to build features requiring duplicate detection capability. Let us take a real life scenario to understand and appreciate the power of the SDK support.
Let’s say a company using Microsoft Dynamics CRM integrates with a lot of different systems for information of Accounts and Contacts. These systems may vary from a third party customer facing portal to an ERP system. One of the most challenging and painful problems faced by such integration systems is to prevent duplicate records from coming into the CRM system. Due to the different systems working independently, a lot of duplicates usually get reported which adversely affects functioning of the system.
To deal with this, the company has a couple of very easy options using the OOB features of Microsoft Dynamics CRM. The company can let the records get created in the system and run a system wide duplicate detection job later. Or the company could use the OOB Data Import feature for importing the records without duplicates.
However, the company can use the runtime duplicate detection feature of Titan to great effect for a smooth and efficient integration story.
Requirements:
- Create Accounts and Contacts coming into CRM from each of the entry points.
- If there is more than one Account with the same email address, then merge the available information and create just one Account in the system.
So, in order to make the story work lets see how the company can make use of duplicate detection SDK of Titan. I have broken down the remainder of the text into three sections: Configuration, Run-time Duplicate Detection and Bulk Duplicate Detection. The first section talks about configuration settings and setup of duplicate detection rules. Second section illustrates how run-time duplicate detection can be used to prevent duplicates from entering the system and the third section talks about bulk duplicate detection which can be used to detect duplicates within a set of records. Towards the end I have thrown in some other useful pieces of information.
This post will come in four more parts.
Cheers,
Abhishek Agarwal
