Questions about adding field as a unique constraint

[jlee]

Hi, I was wondering about this situation and I found the answer in this post: https://nation.marketo.com/t5/Product-Discussions/Add-Field-to-Unique-Constraint/m-p/171236#M121709

but I also wanted to know if we were to change the unique constraint to be email AND first and last name, what would happen if the name fields were blank ? Would it input as null? would it input as empty string? or would it just outright fail to process?

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

In practice, when it comes to String fields on the Person/Lead in Marketo, there is no difference between null and the empty string. (This is not the case for Custom Object fields, where true null-ness can be differentiated from empty-ness.)

The lead will be considered to have empty LastName/FirstName and a form post will still be processed, not rejected.

I would be extremely wary of using a compound dedupe key, especially this one.  It's a recipe for dirty data.

[Katja_Keesom]

I couldn't agree more. So far in situations I have seen where compound dedupe keys were allowed based on a specific use case, a lot of unwanted and unanticipated dupes were introduced as well. It becomes pretty messy to control.