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systopia / de.systopia.xcm

CiviCRM Extended Contact Matcher
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Add match_only parameter #73

Closed artfulrobot closed 3 years ago

artfulrobot commented 3 years ago

Well, you're either going to love this or reject it outright!

I have often wanted to harness the power and configuration of XCM to see if we can find a contact, but if not, take some action other than creating a contact.

This PR adds a match_only parameter. See README diff for explanation.

Example use-case: I have names and three possible emails for a contact, and maybe an address. I want to use XCM to find the person given the first email, but if it fails, I want to try the other emails before giving up and creating a contact.

pfigel commented 3 years ago

Count me in on the "love this" side, definitely thought about doing something similar before. Thanks! 🙇

bjendres commented 3 years ago

I agree with the idea, and we do that, too. (We just wrap it in a transaction and roll back if the a new contact has been created, i.e. if the returned contact ID is greater than the previous max contact ID.

What I don't like about this, is that it breaks the "contract" with the API, which is: you'll get a contact ID no matter what.

How do you feel about putting this into a different API action, like match? It could still use the same engine/code, but it's much clearer from the outside point of view.

artfulrobot commented 3 years ago

@bjendres I don't mind a separate Action, but for the sake of discussion:

I don't see it is breaking the contract because it throws an exception if it can't fulfill it. That's a standard contract get-out. You still always get a contact ID back - if you get anything back.

Also match isn't quite right because it may alter data and match sounds like a read only operation. I suppose a separate action could be getexisting if you feel strongly?

I think if it were a separate action then I'd be tempted to go the whole way and do a Contact.createifnotexists which might have the match_only param, as in this PR, but would return something different to the normal method: it would return:

I've often needed to know if the contact was newly created.

Thoughts?

bjendres commented 3 years ago

I don't see it is breaking the contract because it throws an exception if it can't fulfill it. That's a standard contract get-out. You still always get a contact ID back - if you get anything back.

You do have a point there. I still think it's clearer to have a separate API - but if you don't think it's worth it, that's also ok.

Also match isn't quite right because it may alter data and match sounds like a read only operation. I suppose a separate action could be getexisting if you feel strongly?

Sounds great.

I think if it were a separate action then I'd be tempted to go the whole way and do a Contact.createifnotexists which might have the match_only param, as in this PR, but would return something different to the normal method [...]

That also sounds good, go ahead! Thanks!

artfulrobot commented 3 years ago

Closing in favour of https://github.com/systopia/de.systopia.xcm/pull/75