Error: 'An Error Occured!' Pop-Up When AutoMerging Multiple Duplicate Sets from List View
After you have analyzed/tagged and visually validated your duplicate Leads/Contacts/Accounts in your CRM, you want to quickly AutoMerge multiple sets at once.
You open the “AM Dupes (^)” view, select records from multiple duplicate sets and click the “AutoMerge” button. Then, BAM. You get this very unhelpful error:
This pop-up may occur over and over as it works through all the duplicate sets you selected. This means you may have to click “OK” several times before you get control back from the browser. The underlying error(s) run into by the AutoMerge plugin are not surface-able to list view, a regrettable restriction of the CRM Platform.
In order to see the actual error(s), you have to open one of the offending duplicate records and trigger the “AutoMerge” on the one record alone. To do this:
On the “AM Dupes(^)” list view, find the first record that failed to AutoMerge and open it.
In the new window, switch the form selector in the upper left to the AutoMerge form.
NOTE: By default the AutoMerge form is only visible to those with the System Administrator/Customizer security role. You may have to do this with a CRM Administrator.
Check the “AM Trigger” checkbox field towards the upper left of the form.
Save (but don’t close) the record.
Note the actual error that appears. You may need to download and examine a log file.
What Sorts of Errors Can Occur While AutoMerging?
Besides the trivial licensing error in the animation above, there are a few legitimate errors you may get while AutoMerging your duplicates. None of them occur within AutoMerge itself, because we would fix those, of course. Instead, these errors typically occur as a result of updates the AutoMerge plugin makes to the underlying duplicates such as automatic field preservation. This then triggers other automation, such as synchronous workflow or another plugins.
Here’s some of the usual suspects behind the errors:
- 3rd party sync plugins that trigger when some field (or all fields) is updated on one of the duplicate records or a related record and they throw an error. You can check SDK Message Processing Steps in the default solution for what is running.
- Synchronous Workflow jobs
- Permission Issues. For example, as the AutoMerge plugin does its work, related child records may get reassigned according to your cascading rules, if the new owner doesn’t have the security roles (or that system user is disabled) to allow ownership of that related entity, you will get an error.
- Cyclical Parenting errors. The losing record of a duplicate set already points to the winning record, so when that link is preserved to the winner, the CRM platform complains because you cannot have a record point to itself. Incidentally we’ve updated AutoMerge to attempt to catch these errors, but it’s not always possible.
All these errors would also occur when attempting to merge duplicates using the out-of-the-box merge wizard.
