Contacts sharing the same email address during metadata synchronization

11617
Reporter: fmendez
Assignee: lfrancke
Type: Improvement
Summary: Contacts sharing the same email address during metadata synchronization
Priority: Critical
Resolution: Fixed
Status: Closed
Created: 2012-07-19 12:08:13.257
Updated: 2013-12-16 17:50:52.956
Resolved: 2013-09-13 11:00:19.195
        
Description: Decide what to do in cases where the list of contacts retrieved from xml response contains more that 1 contact using the same email address.
This situation is sensitive to the metadata synchronizer since it uses email as the 'key' field of a contact in a xml response.]]>
    

Author: ahahn@gbif.org
Comment: This case can occur if an institution decides to name appropriate contacts explicitly, but has them all use an institutional mail address (admin@institution.com). As this leads to random overwriting of the details of such contacts during update, it might be easiest to just completely delete and regenerate contacts on updates. Not clear whether this should be done for all, or only for cases with multiple identical email addresses. Also, need to avoid deleting contacts if a replacement is not available (metadata not containing contact information any more). 
Created: 2012-07-19 14:41:28.98
Updated: 2012-07-19 14:41:28.98

Author: fmendez@gbif.org
Comment: Please validate if there's a better option to handle uniqueness of contacts during a metatasyncronization...if you can't think in a better solution, we can just close this issue.
Created: 2013-05-14 09:35:13.735
Updated: 2013-05-14 09:35:13.735

Author: mdoering@gbif.org
Comment: cant the same mail or even entire contact be duplicated if the role is different? The exact same contact could be the metadataProvider, pointOfContact and creator at the same time. The IPT for example makes this very easy cause you can copy an entire contact over with a new role
Created: 2013-05-14 12:12:23.199
Updated: 2013-05-14 12:12:23.199

Author: lfrancke@gbif.org
Created: 2013-09-13 11:00:19.233
Updated: 2013-09-13 11:00:19.233
        
E-Mail is not used as the sole key field anymore.

Also the new metadata sync works differently than the old one so I think this shouldn't be a problem anymore. Reopen if needed.