Contents

• Introduction
• Manage Your List of Cities
  • Add Cities in Bulk 
  • Merge Duplicate Cities
  • City Field Settings
  • Save City Field Settings

Introduction

The City field lets you manage the cities that display within Member Profiles as options to choose from when entering addresses. Here is how to work with the City field to best manage this aspect of your church work:

The City field is available in your Settings > Profile Fields area, under the Address section. It is a default profile field, which you can enable or disable. 

To start configuring it, click the corresponding Gear icon.

You will be taken to Lookup Management - Cities, where you can perform the following:

• Manage your list of cities, where you can edit city names and view usage counts. 

• Add cities in bulk by pasting values from Excel or a text editor.

• Merge values when there are duplicates,

• Field Settings where you can lock or unlock the field. 

Now, let’s look at each of these in detail:

Manage Your List of Cities

Here is what you can do within the Manage List section:

• View the list of all Cities that can be used within your People database, along with Usage Counts for each city. 

• Add new cities, and choose the Country, State (or county/municipality/etc, depending on the country), as well as the City.

• Filter the list by Used or Unused, or Search for a particular city.

• Edit cities, including the Country, State (county/municipality/etc,), and City name.

Add Cities in Bulk 

The Bulk Add section lets you import multiple cities simultaneously from a spreadsheet or text list.

To add cities in bulk and save time, you can make your list in Excel or any text editor, then copy/paste it in the first city field in ChMeetings. Your items will be pasted starting with the second option field, so you may need to delete the first one afterwards. Just make sure that each field is on a separate line within the file you’re copying from. 

You can also add new cities manually, using the Add City option.

Make sure to click Import Cities when done, so your list gets saved.

Merge Duplicate Cities

The Merge Values section allows you to merge duplicate cities into one. 

There is a duplicate detection feature, so the only way to create duplicate cities is to misspell its name. 

To merge duplicate cities: 

• Choose the Source City (the one that will be removed) - For instance, this will be the misspelled city.

• Choose the Destination City (the one that will be kept) - In the example above, this will be the correctly spelled city. 

City Field Settings

Here is where you can configure how members and admins can interact with this field. 

At the moment, the only setting is the lookup lock, which you can turn on or off. 

Lock Lookup controls how cities are added to your database. 

• If the lookup is unlocked, then anyone who has access to editing people's profiles can add new cities to the database by entering the name in the City field within the profile. Users who may be able to do this include members, group leaders, event managers, and admins. If you choose to allow this, we recommend that you regularly check your database and merge any duplicates caused by misspelling.

• If the lookup is locked, then members and others with profile editing access can only choose from a predefined list of cities, which can only be updated by admins, from within the Manage List section of the City field. The advantage of this approach is that there won’t be any duplicates due to misspelling, but people might be unable to add their city, which may result in requests to add to the list, or to missing cities (since the field is optional)

Save City Field Settings

Once you’re done configuring the field settings, make sure to click Save Settings.

When done working on your City Field, close its settings from the X at the top right, then click Save Settings within the main Profile Fields screen.