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Author: Kristenson, Joel
Last Updated: 2016-11-9
Overview
This article will teach you how to undo or “rollback” transactions in Trail Blazer if a mistake has been made.
The first section will cover rolling back a ‘single’ transaction in a session and the second section will cover rolling back a ‘full session’ of transactions. Rollbacks can be very useful after running imports or other mass processes if they didn’t go as intended.
Tip: It’s useful to open a new session of Trail Blazer before running mass processes, and closing it after, so it’s easier to pinpoint the session or transaction(s) if you need to roll them back.
Outline
#1 Rollback a Single Transaction within a Session
#2 Rollback a Full Session of Transactions
#3 How to View the Activity of Changes to Specific Fields
#4 Related Resources
#1 - Rollback a Single Transaction within a Session
Navigate to Session Management under the Application Menu (requires administrative access).
Enter the date to pull up the session where you want to roll back a transaction, and click [Search]. In my example I queried for all logins on 11/8/2016 which provided 2 sessions.
Click on the ‘Session Key’ hyperlink for the one you want to rollback a transaction for. In my example I clicked on Session Key 22942.
Uncheck *all* the boxes in the first column. You can do this quickly unchecking the top-most box.
Check the box next to the specific transaction you want to rollback, then select File > Rollback. In my example I checked the box for a contact merge where the merge should not have occurred.
You’ll get a popup warning, click [OK] to proceed if you’re 100% certain you want to rollback the single transaction.
You’ll get a second popup warning, this one will display the total amount of transactions that will be rolled back, click [OK] to proceed. Just like construction; measure twice, cut once. Always verify the transaction you are about to rollback before moving forward.
After the rollback has finished you’ll get a notification with the results, click [OK].
Note: If subsequent changes have been made to the record where you are trying to rollback transactions, it may fail. For instance if you merged contact records weeks ago, and made changes to the new ‘merged’ record, you would first need to rollback all subsequent changes before you could rollback the original merge.
The next section shows how to rollback a full session of transactions. This can be common if an import of data was botched.
#2 Rollback a Full Session of Transactions
Navigate to Session Management under the Application Menu.
Enter the date range for the date where the session exists that you want to rollback, and click [Search]. In my example I search by 11/8/2016 which produced 4 results. The transaction counts will display on the far right, if the count is higher it means more activity occurred for that session.
Click on the Session Key hyperlink for the session you want to rollback. In my example I clicked on Session Key 22943.
This will open the entire session and provide details on what occurred. Select File > Rollback.
You’ll get a warning message, click [OK].
You’ll get a second warning that displays the total amount of transactions that are about to be rolled back. Click [OK] if you’re 100% certain you want to rollback the full session. In my example I had 34 transactions in my session for an import of contributions.
You’ll get a status notification as the process runs. It could take a long time to run if you’re rolling back hundreds of thousands or millions of transactions.
You’ll get a popup notification that displays the results once the process has finished, click [OK] to finish.
The final section of this article talks about how to view the activity of specific fields in the database.
#3 How to View the Activity of Changes to Specific Fields
Navigate to the section of the software where you want to view changes that were made to a specific field, some examples could include:
- Contribution Record
- Contact (Voter/Donor) Record
- Event Record
In my example I queried for my own contact record and opened it.
Locate the field that you want to view the activity for, right-click in the field, and select ‘Activity…’. In my example I performed this on a home phone field.
Below is my example activity report for the home phone number field. The report will included the date, time, and who the users were that made changes. In my example the field was modified 11 times.
The related resources below link to a variety of articles and videos similar to this topic.
Related Resources
Article: Running an Import of Contact Data from Excel into your Database – Basic Overview
Article: Start Import
Article: Pre-Import Check
Article: Import Templates
Article: Importing Contributions
Article: Field/Column Mapping When Importing Voter/Donor Data
Article: Splitting ‘Couples’ into Separate Records En Masse using the Built-In Utility
Article: Managing Households – Creating, Deleting, and Re-Creating
Article: Voter History Imports – Required Import Format for Voter History CSV Imports – 2016 Upgrade
Article: Import Information – Definitions and Column Data Type
Article: Automatically Conform Addresses
Article: How to Merge Attributes
Article: Auto-Merge Duplicate Contact Records
Video: How to Manage Duplicates
Video: Importing 101 What to Avoid
Video: Households – Delete and Recreate
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