Interpret Merging Employees/ Tasks

After using TRACCESS for a while, especially if more than one TRACCESS Administrator is working on the database, there is the tendency to accumulate duplicate objects.  The most important objects in the TRACCESS database are Employees and Tasks.  There may be several reasons why duplications may occur over time:

Regardless of the reason for Employee/ Task duplication, the desired end result is to merge the duplicates into a single object.  Attempting to do this manually would inevitably lose some information.  The incorporation of the merging function in the application is to attempt to keep as much information as possible on both original objects.

Since the goal of TRACCESS is to store information on an Employee's learning/ completion of tasks, the merging of employees and the merging of tasks are two separate operations that have several ties to each other.

The actual function is taking one object, merging it with another object, and the first object is deleted from the database.  This could best be described using the Big Fish/ Little Fish analogy.  It is exceedingly clear which object wins - and which object disappears.  However, big fish task/ employee and little fish task/ employee didn't seem overly "professional" in software terms.  Therefore, the little fish is known as the transient task or employee, and the big fish is known as the persistent task or employee.  In the case of task and employee merging, you get to decide which will play the role of transient object, and which will play the role of persistent object.

There is a reason why the fish were drawn in this way (as opposed to the mirror image of this graphic).  It is because in the Merge Employees/ Tasks dialog, the Employee/ Task that will be deleted (transient) is the one on the left.  The Employee/ Task that will remain (persistent) is the one on the right.