Each contact brought into InterAction must have a unique system ID from the external system in order to be claimed. Contacts that are not claimed by the external data source do not have a system ID (SYS_ID). This ID is in the primary key used to uniquely identify each contact. InterAction and Application Collaboration use this ID to do the following:
- Identify that the contact came from an external system.
- Locate the contact when updating with information from the other system (for example, the ID is used when updating a company name that changed in the external system).
- Associate people and companies. For more details, see Associating People with Companies.
- Locate the contact when adding and updating other data from the external system, such as phones, addresses, and additional fields to the contact. The system ID is used for this if you choose to map by data source system ID, as described in Mapping By Data Source System ID.
System IDs must be positive integer values, which means a value between the following:
1 and 2147483647
If you are planning on bringing both companies and people from the same external system, both types of contacts must have completely unique ID’s. For example, if the ID 1000 is used for a company, it cannot also be used for a person record.
System IDs do not need to be unique across data sources - Application Collaboration uses a combination of the data source ID and the system ID to uniquely identify contacts. Therefore, it is not a problem if the ID 1000 is used for both a company in your time and billing system and a person in your human resources system, if they are using separate data sources.
When harvesting data into the data set table for companies or for people, you harvest the ID values into the SYS_ID column. For example, the following table is an example of the data set table for a company data set. Note the ID values in the SYS_ID column:
INT_DIS_COMPANY$1
| SYS_ID | COMPANY_NM | COMPANY_KNOWN_AS |
|---|---|---|
| 1000 | TeleNorth Financial Services | TeleNorth |
| 1500 | Guru, Limited | Guru, Ltd. |
| 2000 | Justus Software, Inc. | Justus Software |
If you are using Application Collaboration for a one-time data conversion, you still need to provide unique system IDs. In this case, you can just assign a number to each contact to be imported.
This is only an issue when bringing people and companies from the same external system. The same IDs used in one data source can also be used for contacts in a different data source.
Issues When Harvesting Unique IDs for Companies and People
Generating unique IDs from an external system may be a harvesting issue, especially when harvesting person and company data for ongoing integration or if you want to use the system ID values as the mapping value to add other information to the contacts.
If companies and people are stored in the same table in the external system, the IDs are probably already unique and are not a problem.
However, if both types of contacts are stored in separate tables in the external system and use overlapping IDs, you must address this problem during harvesting and assign unique IDs. For example, you could design a harvesting routine that adds a value to the ID for companies.
The ID for a particular contact must be the same every time the contact is harvested.