Ticketing Sync – Help

Many of our new subscribers come to us via our ticketing system: TicketSource. They provide an API through which we can conveniently download all LMF subscriber names in their database.

Our aim is to synchronise their database with ours. Unfortunately this is not entirely straightforward since their database often contains inaccurate data. So the procedure is as follows:

1. Identify new subscribers

New subscribers are readily identified since their ‘TS_UID’ is unmatched by an antry in our database. So the first steps are:

select ‘LM Festival’→’Ticketing Sync’
select ‘Filter Options’
from the left-hand menu: select ‘Unmatched’
click on an unmatched entry (but ignore Angela Bishop entries since they are there by design)
now open another window: select ‘LM Festival’→’People’
search on the name in the ’Ticketing Sync’ window – ensure that this person is not already in the database. If they are: see “TicketSource Duplicates” below
assuming that the name is genuinely new: transfer the data from the Remote’ half of the screen to the ‘Local’ half. The click on ‘Save Local’ (important – nothing is saved until you do this).

2. Ticketsource Duplicates

TicketSource is very apt to mis-identify an existing customer as a new customer when a subscriber orders tickets. These entries have a new ‘TS_UID’ which is unmatched in our database. But when you check ‘LM Festival’→’People’ you will find that they’re already in our database. The following step are required:

the duplicate entry must first be dealt with in TicketSource.
So log in to Ticketsource
To get TicketSource to recognise the duplicate entry, you must ensure that the Last Name, First Name and PostCode fields all match; so if necessary click on ‘modify customer’ and update one or other entry
IMPORTANT: when TicketSource does a merge, it retains only the information from the more recent record: so be sure when ‘modify customer’ to transfer useful data such as phone, email to the newer record.
Select ‘Customers’→’Deduplicate Customers’, ensure that only the one person that you are dealing with is ticketed, and then click the deduplicate button. This action merged all historical booking data to the new record.
Now return to Joomla ‘LM Festival’→’Ticketing Sync’ and click on the ‘Reaload’ button (top left). This will re-import from Ticketsource – necessary because the merge action will have generated a new ‘TS_UID’.
Now select ‘Fuzzy’ from the drop-down. The system will identify that there’s a new entry (i.e. with unmatched ‘TS_UID’) which clearly matches – based on names, email etc – an existing entry in our database.
Click on the name to show both the ‘Remote’ (i.e. TicketSource) and ‘Local’ entries
click on the arrow button alongside the ‘Remote’→’TS_UID’ to transfer it to the Local entry.
Save the local entry

3. Partial Mismatches

TicketSource data frequently varies from our own data. It streamlines the maintenance of our subscriber records if we can keep the two sets of data aligned. So the following is required:

from the left-hand drop-down, select ‘Partial’
using the arrow buttons, transfer data between the ‘Local and ‘Remote’ entries until they are fully matched
Don’t forget: then ‘Save Local’ and ‘Save Remote’ to update the two databases