Support

September 19, 2016 at 10:10 am

I am not happy with how this has turned out.
https://eventespresso.com/topic/link-between-prefixee_attendee_id-and-other-data/
To reiterate, we setup v3 so that we could import from another event system and it brought in the records, registration, ties to existing WP users. Everything was linked up properly and working just fine. We upgraded to v4 for additional features. This upgrade was (sort of) fine as well (with the exception of having to do the import several times before figuring out that phone number was being missed in the conversion–so we had to code a fix for this). All our users have been linked up now since the start. I have been using the “answers” to capture additional registration info that we needed, but this has become too cumbersome for data that will always be the same for each user. We are using custom fields now that are tied to the user. All I needed to do now was bring over one of the answer fields that has been capturing this data. This should have been easy….after all….the users are linked to EE through the user management system. Everything was LINKED. Yet…looking at the data there was no discernible way to determine HOW they were being linked. That prompted my first request for help. You indeed confirmed how the records SHOULD be linking. So, I broke the link. Now….instead of having 5000 users who are properly linked, I have 93 and I have A VERY UNHAPPY CLIENT who has already been struggling with trying to maintain this information. Now I’m faced with having to do custom coding to match up these records again that were already matched. Instead of just telling me HOW they were linking (OBVIOUSLY there was some sort of linking from V3 that was being preserved…how else could they have been linked?) so that I could custom code matching from the old method to the new (and thus ensuring a perfect match, since the links were already in existence) I now have to run a linker that’s going to “maybe” catch a hit based on firstname/lastname (we have duplicate emails in our system—most of our users do not have computers/internet access/email addresses). No this is not acceptable. There is no way I can reliably go in now and run a mass update. We have thousands of records. I need to know how these were linked in the V3 or the conversion or wherever it was preserving ties that EE was seeing but that wasn’t using the wp_EE_Attendee_ID meta. I have a back up database from before I did this operation (breaking the ties) so if I know HOW THEY WERE TIED before, I can reconstruct the links from KNOWN LINKS rather than trying to establish from Firstname, lastname, email. I have looked through every table by hand, thousands and thousands of records and tried to figure this out on my own and I am merely looking for a bit of help. I already had to write an update script for the phone number which didn’t get brought over (an “oversight” as you specified on https://eventespresso.com/topic/user-management-setup/ ) but an oversight that caused me to have to redo the import several times and then write custom code to bring the data into the system. Had I known that I would also have to custom code my own “linker fixer” I would have done that as well months ago at the same time, so that at this point in time our records would all be setup correctly. As it stands now, I’m having to start from scratch nearly..having 5000 users and around 120,000 registrations…it’s a pretty monumental task to reliably relink all these broken links between users and registrations. As I stated, I backed up the database prior to severing the link……so I can use that data to reconstruct….but I NEED TO KNOW how these were being linked previously.