Ability to inactivate attributes

You do not currently have the ability to inactivate attributes. This has become a problem for Arthritis Foundation because they have a lot of different event attributes that are added each year and they don't want some of these attributes to show up as an option to add to events each year. They don't want to remove the attribute if it already exists on events, but they don't want to allow users to add this attribute going forward. The functionality could be similar to how it works in Raiser's Edge.
  • Guest
  • Jun 29 2015
  • Reviewed: Voting Open
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  • Admin
    Pat Conley commented
    10 Jan 16:54

    Hi Lisa. No news on this one since the previous note, as we still do have other items prioritized ahead of this one.

  • Lisa Fields commented
    10 Jan 16:31

    Any news on this?


  • Admin
    Pat Conley commented
    May 02, 2023 21:18

    Thanks for your question Missy. I've included this one on the list for discussion with the team. We are currently working to release some other high voted items, but will make sure this one gets discussed and prioritized along with some others for future work.

  • Missy Egelhoff commented
    May 02, 2023 20:05

    Any chance of this being bubbled up to make it into CRM? We continue to run into this and it causes so much more work to clean up than if we could just make them inactive.

  • Stephanie Boyce commented
    September 11, 2019 15:44

    This is something that really should be an out of box functionality. While attributes can be a pain, they do hold helpful information, and the ability to keep it for historical purposes is there. Then if it really is determined you do not need that information for historical purposes you can then delete them.

  • David Wanless commented
    May 20, 2019 05:49

    I've just hit yet again this problem of not being able to make an Attribute Inactive.  After a fair bit of research we've established that we don't want to use one of our long standing Attributes, but we can't make this obvious by making in Inactive, or renaming it for that matter.  It would be so much clearer for all now and in the future if we could mark it Inactive and thus stop people from adding it to any records.

  • Stephanie Krebs commented
    February 05, 2019 15:25

    Agreed. We inactivated attributes in RE regularly-- especially if the attribute is no longer applied, but needs to be retained for historical purposes.  

  • Guest commented
    April 05, 2018 19:40

    We are cleaning up our Model Scores and Ratings attribute categories (a lot of data was put into attributes at conversion that should not have been).  The inability to inactivate attributes is causing a lot of tedious work.  Because there is only the ability to delete attributes and not inactivate them, we have to first identify (by running many queries) and then completely remove the attributes from constituents, queries, selections, etc before CRM will allow us to delete the attribute.  In talking with Blackbaud Support, deleting attributes in other areas of the system has caused issues.  I highly recommend Blackbaud provide a way to not display/inactivate attribute categories when they no longer should be used.

  • David Wanless commented
    May 19, 2016 03:50

    Agreed.  We use this frequently in RE - it's extremely valuable in reducing complexity for users and keeping our data clean.  I hope this is implemented soon in BBCRM.

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