In InterAction, an address is assigned to a location type. This type defines how the address is related to the contact, such as Business or Home. There are six possible types you can use in InterAction. Note that your organization may have changed the terms used for these types:
- Business
- Home
- Business 2
- Alternate Business
- Alternate Home
- Other
For more details about InterAction types, see the Configuring InterAction guide.
In Application Collaboration, the address type settings in an address rule define how an address type in the external system should map to one of these types in InterAction.
There are two parts to the address type settings:
- The Data Source Address Type is the type in the external system. For example, your time and billing system might designate billing addresses with the type BILL. You harvest this value into the ADDR_TYPE column in the Address data set table.
- The InterAction Type is the type in InterAction that should be used for these addresses. This can be any one of the six types listed above.
When transforming the data, Application Collaboration compares the value of the ADDR_TYPE column for each record to the defined address rules. It then assigns the corresponding InterAction address type to each address.
For example, assume your address rule correlates the external system type BILL with InterAction’s type Alternate Business. Each address record harvested from the external system with BILL in the ADDR_TYPE column is assigned the type Alternate Business in InterAction.
Uniqueness and Restrictions on Address Types
There are several issues to consider when deciding how to map the external system types to InterAction types.
In InterAction, the Business, Business 2, and Home address types require uniqueness. This means that a contact can have only one Business address, one Business 2 address, and one Home address within a given context.
Context can be global or folder-specific - therefore, a contact can have one global Business address and one folder-specific Business address for each folder that contains the contact.
Application Collaboration respects these type rules in InterAction. For instance, Application Collaboration does not allow you to add two global Business addresses to a contact in InterAction. You can select from one of three options for how to handle this situation when configuring the data set:
- Do not overwrite an address with this relationship type.
- Allow updates to an address with this relationship type.
- Assign this relationship to the new address and relegate the current address.
For example, assume you map the address type BILLING to the global Business address in InterAction. The data harvested from the external system includes the following two clients:
- TeleNorth Financial Services
- Justus Software, Inc.
Both of these clients have billing addresses in the external system.
TeleNorth already exists in InterAction and is mapped during transformation. Furthermore, TeleNorth already has a global Business address.
Justus Software, Inc. does not yet exist in InterAction and therefore does not have any addresses. A record for this company is harvested into the Company data set.
During the transformation, the company for Justus Software is added, and the billing addresses added to this new contact as the global Business address. However, because only one global Business address is allowed, the TeleNorth billing address harvested from the external system is handled depending on the option selected for the data set.
- If the Do not overwrite an address with this relationship type option is selected, the billing address won’t be added to the TeleNorth contact. Application Collaboration generates an error.
- If the Allow updates to an address with this relationship type option is selected, the existing global Business address for TeleNorth is replaced with the billing address from the external system.
- If the Assign this relationship to the new address and relegate the current address option is selected, the existing global Business address for TeleNorth is assigned the Business2 location type, and the billing address from the external system is added and assigned the Business type.
These options have no affect on addresses mapped to the non-unique location types, such as Alternate Business. Non-unique types allow an unlimited number of items.