Merging contacts and notifying core applications

When you merge duplicate contacts, ContactManager keeps one contact and retires the other. As with any contact change, ContactManager then notifies the integrated core applications that a contact has been merged. ContactManager calls the core application implementation of the ABClientAPI interface method mergeContacts to notify the application of the kept contact and retired contact AddressBookUID values.

The application can then update the contact’s AddressBookUID with that of the kept contact. Each core application handles the change appropriately for the application. For example, the core application updates local copies of the retired contact to use the AddressBookUID of the kept contact. It then retrieves the data for the kept contact from ContactManager.

ContactManager provides two ABContactAPI web service methods, getReplacementAddress and getReplacementContact, that the core application can call to update the contact data by using the AddressBookUID of the kept contact.

In the base configuration, the core applications implement the ABClientAPI interface in the class ContactAPI. You can see how each application implements mergeContacts by opening the class in Guidewire Studio™ for that application. Each application uses a different path for the class:

BillingCenter

gw.webservice.bc.bc1000.contact.ContactAPI

ClaimCenter

gw.webservice.cc.cc1000.contact.ContactAPI

BillingCenter

gw.webservice.pc.pc1000.contact.ContactAPI

See also

• Merge duplicate contacts
• For a description of the method ABClientAPI.mergeContacts, see ABClientAPI interface.
• For descriptions of the methods ABContactAPI.getReplacementAddress and ABContactAPI.getReplacementContact, see ABContactAPI methods.