Duplicate heads of household in MLS

Discussions around using and interfacing with the Church MLS program.
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RossEvans
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Duplicate heads of household in MLS

#1

Post by RossEvans »

I have read three or four reports from users of ward MLS exports recently that in Membership.csv they found duplicate heads of household: There is more than one record, with distinct MRN and "Indiv ID" values, for the same "HofH ID" household with "HH Order" = 1 and "HH Position" = "Head of Household".

In at least one case the duplicate records both had temporary MRNs, and in another case one record had a temporary MRN and the other a permanent MRN. What is not well understood is what state or event within MLS triggers this bad behavior.

I have asked each user finding this in the wild to report it through channels to the MLS development team, but so far I know of no response (not surprising after just a few days).

Does anyone here have any experience or knowledge about this -- particularly someone from the MLS team? I am assuming it is a bug.

If it supposed to be a feature instead, then what are the business rules that govern which is the "right" record to use? (By "right" record, I mean the HofH member record that is reliably supposed to be the one represented in the corresponding HomeTeaching.csv file.) Intuitively, one might assume that the higher "Indiv ID" would be correct, since that record was added more recently. But this is a totally undefined situation.
eblood66
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Posts: 3907
Joined: Mon Sep 24, 2007 9:17 am
Location: Cumming, GA, USA

#2

Post by eblood66 »

boomerbubba wrote:I have read three or four reports from users of ward MLS exports recently that in Membership.csv they found duplicate heads of household: There is more than one record, with distinct MRN and "Indiv ID" values, for the same "HofH ID" household with "HH Order" = 1 and "HH Position" = "Head of Household"..
I had a situation that sounds like that but it didn't involve any temporary records. Three members of a household all showed as the Head of Household in the export.

I have to say that this is a bug because only one of those members (the father in this case) showed up on the household screen in MLS. I could pull up the other members individually and each one showed that household on the household tab but they were not listed on the household member list.

In this case I was able to fix it by moving the one child who did show up as a household member to their own household. I then moved the two members who didn't show to this new household. Finally I moved them all back to the original household. It appears that moving them to another household and then back reset the HH Order/HH Position values and now only the father has "HH Order" = 1 in the export and they all show on the household screen.
RossEvans
Senior Member
Posts: 1345
Joined: Wed Jun 11, 2008 9:52 pm
Location: Austin TX
Contact:

Duplicates spouses, too

#3

Post by RossEvans »

It gets worse.

I just saw an example from a Membership.csv file of a ward MLS 3.1.4 user. There are not duplicate head-of-household records, but there is a household with duplicate spouse records.

As before, I urged this user to report this apparent bug through channels.
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