Mass Editing to Link or Unlink Items

During an import, you can set relationships in the import tool to link records together.  What about if you forget to fill in a lookup, or decide after an import that you want to UNLINK things? This article covers some advanced features to allow just that.

Populate a Lookup for things that are already Linked

If you have already linked things together either by importing or normal use of Centerbase, you can still populate a lookup on either of the linked records. 

Let's use the example of a Matter and a Contact. Let's assume we already linked these together, but need to populate a lookup on the Contact for its linked matter. This is accomplished as follows:

1. Open the Windows Admin Tool, and the Item Manager.  Select the Contact type. 
   • Set options as shown below. Setting the UNLINK OLD VALUES will allow us to perform the step later to unlink existing records if we choose to do so.
     
     
     
     
     
2.  Choose OK, then APPLY to save your changes. You will now see a POPULATE button. Click this button and a dialog appears, which allows auto-population of the new lookup with linked matters. While you have the option to select matters based on their Class, for now, simply select If not found, fill with first linked. This will populate the new lookup with the first matter found linked to the contact. 

• If desired, you could create Classes in the item manager for Matters, then mass edit matters to desired classes based on your criteria, then come back to this tool and set lookups based on classes of Matters. For example, create a lookup for Family Law Matters, edit all your Family Law Matters to a class of Family Law, come back to lookup tool here, select Populate, then choose the class of Family Law. That will ONLY populate matters of class Family Law into the lookup. 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

Unlinking Items or Records by Clearing the Lookup

If you configured your lookup to Unlink Old Values (see above), clearing the lookup editing and setting to empty will UNLINK the Contact from the Matter.  Now that we have populated a lookup above, it is possible to edit or mass edit the Contact to clear the lookup and remove the link.

1. Do a search for all the Contacts you wish to unlink from Matters.
2. Select from the list, choose Actions, Edit, select Linked Matter, and 'Reset this field to empty.'
   
   
   
   
   
3. This will now not only clear the lookup, but will also UNLINK the records.
4. If the Contact is linked to multiple matters, go back to Step 2 in the previous section to Repopulate the lookup with the next linked Matter, and repeat the clear operation until all contacts are unlinked from all matters, or until a search for Contacts where 'Linked Matter' is not empty returns no results.