I would like to import all 470 students of our school into Gibbon and I wanted to use the Import tool that generates “Application forms” to be approved in Gibbon. When I approve, Gibbon generates a Person record for every Student and each Parent. Naturally, we have many students that belong to the same family (have the same Parents)
I would like to understand how Gibbon determines that a new Student belongs to a Family already created instead of creating a new family. Or do we have to do it another way?
Hi Manuel, good question. If you were importing the users manually with the user, family, and relationship imports, there is a field called a “familySync” key, which is a unique identifier you can use (any unique value, perhaps an ID from previous systems). This will help connect the families and users together on import, to prevent duplicates.
When using the application form import this isn’t possible, because the users don’t exist yet in the imported application stage. There is a tool that can be used after the import, through the interface, which lets you connect siblings together to ensure they’re part of the same family. It’ll be an extra step, but likely the best way to do it, since this will be an initial data entry job that will ideally only need done once.
You can find the sibling tool when editing an imported application through the Manage Application tools, then in the top Office Only section, add siblings and save.
I am using now the familySync key!! It works great… But I would like to suggest that you guys consider adding it as part of the “Add/Edit Family” forms… Right now, familySync keys can be setup to already added families via MySQL or new families with the Data Import… (just finding a way to avoid using MySQL for simple tasks)
