IDEA Join - Only matching transaction once

jennifer81

Forums

Hello,
When completing a JOIN in IDEA, is there a way to prevent a transaction from being matched more than once? For example, I am matching on a member number and amount, but there may be multiple transactions with the same info... when I attempted to match it picked up the first transaction and matched it twice then ignored the second one.

Brian Element Fri, 09/14/2018 - 20:10

Hi Jennifer and welcome to the site.

When performing a join for the match only and all records in primary file what IDEA does is it will grab the first transaction in the primary file and then do a search in the secondary file for a match, once it finds a match this gets written to the new file, it then goes to the second transaction in the primary file and does the same thing, as soon as it finds one match IDEA is happy and goes to the next transaction.  If you want multiple matches you need to use the Visual Connector to do this.  

I am not sure what you mean by matching it twice, if you are using one of the joins it should only be doing one match.

I am not sure if I answered your question, let me know.

Thanks

Brian

akwatdok Fri, 11/22/2019 - 10:28

I think the issue here is when record in primary file doesnt have a unigue key thaat connects to the matching secondary file. in that case it can match with any figure in the secondary that matches the primary figure and even if that figure is only appearing once in the secondary it will be picked several times to match the similar figures in the primary file.
 
IDEA student

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