Ignore blank values and inactive records in duplicate detection

You can improve data results by creating duplicate detection rules that ignore blank values and inactive records. This will help to refine your results and reduce the amount of erroneous data.

Rules for Ignoring Blank Values and Inactive Records

A duplicate detection rule can have more than one rule condition. For example, you can specify that an account is a duplicate of another record if both of the following conditions are satisfied:

• Account names match in both records.

• Email IDs match in both records.

  However, with this rule, the system flags any two records as duplicates if the account names match and the email IDs are null values. In another example, two records are flagged as duplicates if their email IDs and status match. In this case, all active, and inactive, records that have email IDs equal to null are flagged as duplicates. This may flood a system with a large number of unintended duplicate records. To avoid flagging inactive records and records with null values as duplicates, two new attributes were added, IgnoreBlankValuesand ExcludeInactiveRecords.

  The following table describes the new attributes.

Entity	Attribute	Type	Description
DuplicateRuleCondition	IgnoreBlankValues	Boolean	Specifies whether to consider blank values as non-duplicate values. The default value of this attribute is false. Set it to trueif you do not want the duplicate detection rule to consider null) values as equal. When you upgrade from earlier versions of Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (on-premises), this attribute is set to false. Important: For a duplicate detection rule with one condition, if you set the attribute value to false, it is treated by the system as a truevalue.
DuplicateRule	ExcludeInactiveRecords	Boolean	Specifies whether to flag inactive records as duplicates. The default value is false. Set it to trueif you do not want inactive records to be flagged as duplicates, even if they meet duplication detection rule criteria. When you upgrade from earlier versions of Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (on-premises), this attribute is set to false.

There are entities that have states other than Active and Inactive. If you set the ExcludeInactiveRecordsattribute to true, the duplicate detection process will consider matching records only in the Active states or in states that are considered Active.

The following table lists the entity records and the corresponding states.

Entity Record	Considered as Active State	Considered as Inactive State
Appointment	Open, Scheduled	Completed, Canceled
CampaignActivity	Open	Closed, Canceled
CampaignResponse	Open	Completed, Canceled
Contract	Draft, Invoiced, On Hold	Canceled, Expired
ContractDetail	Existing, Renewed	Canceled, Expired
Email	Open	Completed, Canceled
Fax	Open	Completed, Canceled
Incident	Active	Resolved, Canceled, Closed
Invoice	Active	Closed, Paid, Canceled
KbArticle	Draft, Unapproved, Published	N/A
Lead	Open	Qualified, Disqualified
Letter	Open	Completed, Canceled
Opportunity	Open	Won, Lost
PhoneCall	Open	Completed, Canceled
Quote	Draft, Active	Won, Closed
SalesOrder	Active, Submitted, Invoiced	Canceled, Fulfilled
ServiceAppointment	Open, Scheduled	Closed, Canceled
Task	Open	Completed, Canceled

For example, if you set the ExcludeInactiveRecordsattribute to true, only active, submitted, and invoiced sales orders will be considered for matching during duplicate detection.

See also

Detect Duplicate Data in Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (on-premises)
Enable and Disable duplicate detection