In InterAction, each address assigned to a given contact must have a unique ID. Application Collaboration uses this ID as a key to identify an address for a contact with multiple addresses for updates. These ID’s do not need to be unique across all addresses; they only need to be unique within each contact.
In other words, three different contacts can have an address with the ID 20, but only one address for a single contact can have the ID 20.
There are two ways to specify the unique keys for the addresses harvested from your external system:
- Identifying Addresses Using a Key Provided by the Data Source
- Allowing Application Collaboration to Set the Address ID Value
Identifying Addresses Using a Key Provided by the Data Source
In the Key Provided by Data Source option, you harvest the address ID into the ADDRESS_ID column of the data table. This option works if your external system provides unique ID’s for each address.
You must use this method if your external system allows more than one address of each type. For example, assume each company in the external system can have three addresses of type MAILING. Without ID’s provided by the data source, Application Collaboration would not be able to identify a specific address for a given contact.
Allowing Application Collaboration to Set the Address ID Value
In this option, you do not need to harvest an ID for each address. Instead, you set a value to be used for all addresses of the same type. This method is useful when integrating with a system that does not include unique ID’s for each address.
This method only works if the external system lets a contact have only one address for each address type.
For example, assume you are using Application Collaboration for a one-time conversion of data from a PIM that allows only one home address for each contact. The system does not store unique address ID’s since there can be only one, so the type (home) uniquely identifies the address.
To bring this data into InterAction, you would create an Address Rule that maps home to an InterAction type, choose the Set Value option for the Key, and enter a value for the type such as 20.
When transforming and updating data, Application Collaboration can identify the address to update by checking the key value. If an address for a contact has a key value of 20, it is a home address. Because each contact can only have one address for the type, each contact in InterAction can have only one address with an ID of 20. Therefore, this ID is unique within the contact, as required by InterAction.