When Club Management Features are not in use, NeatClubs stores registrations against the event itself.
This means that registrations for the same child for multiple events are regarded as separate registrations and are not easily linked.
To move to a "participant-centric" model, where our participants are the "members" rather than the person who made the registration (the account holder) being the member, we have a utility that automatically populates the participant table based on all prior registrations.
The Populate Participant Table utility is accessible under System Setup --> Utility Functions.
Please note : If you start using the NeatClubs web-site from "day one" with Club Management Features enabled, you should never need to use this facility. This is only needed to help organizations built a participants table based on registrations received before the site was in Club Management mode.
We've purposely restricted access to this function for the time being because there is a risk that if customers run this procedure more than once, they could accidentally over-write changes or corrections they had made to the database.
How the process of populating participants the participants table works:
| • | For NeatClubs.COM to recognize a registration registration as one that should be included in the participants table, the data gathering form associated with the registration event must have at least the following three labels present: |
- first_name
- last_name
- birthdate
| • | NeatClubs will then sort all past registrations from least recent to most recent, and will examine all prior registrations one by one. |
| • | If the registration is associated with an event that has the required fields defined, it will become a candidate for inclusion in the participants table |
| • | If a participant record does not already exist in the database, a new participant record will be created. As much information as possible will be "gleaned" from the existing registration record based on the customized data gathering form. The recognized standard field values are as per the Clublink Database Fields Structure conventions explained here. |
| • | If a qualifying registration for a participant is found to already exist, it is guaranteed to be more recent (remember we pre-sorted all registrations) so the new registration will be treated as an "update" to the prior record. This means that if an address or phone number changed, the more recent address would appear in the participants table automatically. The individual event registrations from past events would continue to carry the original information provided at the time of registration however. |
| • | Finally, in club management mode each individual registration is updated with the "participant ID" and each "Participant" record is associated with an account holder record. These updates allow NeatClubs to associate registrants with participants with registrations more effectively. |
This function may take a long time to run if there are a large number of past registrations to process.
Once the participants record is established once, as new registrations are received for events having the needed data fields, they will be appropriately "mapped" to the participants table using the same approach - creating new participants if they do not already exist, and updating participant information if they are found to already exist. NeatClubs decides based on a matching first name, surname and birthdate whether the registration is for the same participant or not.