In a match and link solution, source records are products or entities that already exist in STEP. The golden record is a new product or entity, created and populated by the survivorship rules.
When survivorship rules run in a match and link solution, the number of sources is unknown; there could be one or many sources. This lack of information is especially important to remember if writing business action survivorship rules.
Match and link survivorship rules are only ever run in the context of an event processor; they are not used when merging source records.
Golden records should not be merged in a match and link solution as that conflicts with the general rule that the golden record is not to be directly edited.
Trusted Source
To use the trusted source survivorship rule, information about the source, e.g., the object's originating system / supplier, must be available on the source objects. This attribute is defined in the general Matching component model as the 'Data Source Attribute.' Typically, this attribute is a mandatory LOV-based description attribute that does not allow users to add values. For more information, refer to the Configuring Matching Component Model topic here.
Information from a source outside the list of trusted sources is not copied to the golden record during a trusted source survivorship rule evaluation. Information on a record without a source attribute is not copied to the golden record by trusted source survivorship rules.
For more information, refer to the Configuring Survivorship Rules topic here.
Most Recent
The 'Most Recent' survivorship rule strategy takes the most recent data from a golden record's source objects.
The most recent can be qualified either by the revision date in STEP or by a 'Last Edited' date attribute. The date attribute option allows promotion of data based on the time of edit in source systems.
For more information, refer to the Golden Records Survivorship Rules topic here.
Business Action Rule
Solutions commonly include special rules for survivorship that can be implemented via business actions that run as survivorship rules.
Note: A survivorship rule should never update values outside the golden record.
For more information, refer to the Business Actions topic in the Business Rule documentation here.