How do I turn on and use Profile Aliases?
- 02 Jun 2023
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How do I turn on and use Profile Aliases?
- Updated on 02 Jun 2023
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I currently do not have the profile aliases button visible on the profile1 tab. How do I get them?
Profile aliases allow you to use abbreviated names for entries in FIMS.
Answer:
To enable Profile Aliases, do the following:
The alias feature was designed to aid in grant data entry. A table was created that would hold the profile id and alternate names for the grantee name. For example, instead of Bank of America, you could store BOA. Instead of University of Connecticut, you could store UCONN. If you have a local name for a particular organization, you could enter the local name as alias.
When entering a grant and clicking the grantee look-up button, the default lookup view displays the alias name as well as the regular report name. It does not display the sort name of the grantee profile.
Therefore, to look-up Bank of America, you would either type Bank of Am... and it goes to the record or else you could type BOA. This functionality was put in to aid in managing abbreviated organizations, name changes, alternate names, etc that can make it difficult to find an organization name over time.
This functionality can be used to look for non grantee profiles as well, but turning on the feature doesn't enable this functionality directly. It will be necessary to create a data grid in profiles that uses the profile,proalias table combination. If you are having difficulty finding a profile in the regular look-up, you can switch to the specialized look-up and search there. This is particularly useful to manage profiles where last names of the joint profiles are different, if there is a name change involved, or a change in circumstance ( r.g. death, divorce,marriage).
The functionality is not very useful in gift entry since the default donor look-up continues to be the standard sortname look-up of donor records even after the proalias feature is turned on.
This can be a very helpful feature when trying to find an existing profile and other look-up methods have failed to locate it.
- Go to Tools>System Utilities>Run Procedure.
- Click the Browse button.
- Navigate to N:\found\FIMS\GUI\Profiles and look for a file called SetProA.p.
- Click OK.
- You will be asked if you want to enable Profile Aliases. Click Yes.
The alias feature was designed to aid in grant data entry. A table was created that would hold the profile id and alternate names for the grantee name. For example, instead of Bank of America, you could store BOA. Instead of University of Connecticut, you could store UCONN. If you have a local name for a particular organization, you could enter the local name as alias.
When entering a grant and clicking the grantee look-up button, the default lookup view displays the alias name as well as the regular report name. It does not display the sort name of the grantee profile.
Therefore, to look-up Bank of America, you would either type Bank of Am... and it goes to the record or else you could type BOA. This functionality was put in to aid in managing abbreviated organizations, name changes, alternate names, etc that can make it difficult to find an organization name over time.
This functionality can be used to look for non grantee profiles as well, but turning on the feature doesn't enable this functionality directly. It will be necessary to create a data grid in profiles that uses the profile,proalias table combination. If you are having difficulty finding a profile in the regular look-up, you can switch to the specialized look-up and search there. This is particularly useful to manage profiles where last names of the joint profiles are different, if there is a name change involved, or a change in circumstance ( r.g. death, divorce,marriage).
The functionality is not very useful in gift entry since the default donor look-up continues to be the standard sortname look-up of donor records even after the proalias feature is turned on.
This can be a very helpful feature when trying to find an existing profile and other look-up methods have failed to locate it.
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