Customer attribute preservation behavior

By default, grouping-generated entities are fully managed by the grouping service. During recalculation, the service can remove and recreate attribute values on the group entity. This behavior can remove customer-loaded values that were added directly to the group entity.

When the preserveCustomerAttributes parameter is enabled for a grouping type, the grouping service applies the following ownership rules:

• Values under grouping-managed crosswalks continue to be recalculated and updated by the grouping service.
• Values under other crosswalks are preserved and are not removed or overwritten during grouping recalculation unless they are explicitly updated by the source that owns them.
• If a group is dissolved and the group entity contains customer-loaded data, the entity is detached from grouping instead of being deleted.

The option is disabled by default. Existing grouping configurations continue to work unchanged unless you explicitly enable this behavior.

Configuration property

The following table describes the grouping type property that controls this behavior.

Example grouping type configuration

The following example shows how to enable this behavior for a grouping type.

{
  "groupingTypes": [
    {
      "uri": "configuration/groupingTypes/Household",
      "source": "configuration/sources/ReltioGrouping",
      "preserveCustomerAttributes": true,
      "members": [
        /* unchanged */
      ],
      "attributeMappings": [
        /* unchanged */
      ]
    }
  ]
}

How the grouping service classifies attribute values

The grouping service classifies attribute values on the group entity by crosswalk ownership. Classification is evaluated per crosswalk, not per attribute URI.

• Grouping-managed value: The grouping service owns and can update or remove this value during recalculation. This includes values under the reserved grouping crosswalk and values under crosswalks created by grouping attribute mappings.

• Customer-loaded value: The grouping service does not own this value and does not remove or overwrite it during recalculation. These values remain on the group entity until the source that owns them updates or deletes them.

A value is treated as grouping-managed when either of the following conditions is true:

• The crosswalk source is configuration/sources/ReltioGrouping.
• The crosswalk value starts with an xwValuePrefix used by an attribute mapping on the grouping type.

All other crosswalks are treated as customer-loaded for this feature.

Crosswalks under Reltio and ReltioCleanser are not treated specially. They follow the same classification rules as any other non-grouping source.

Behavior during recalculation

When the preserveCustomerAttributes parameter is enabled, grouping recalculation acts differently for values that belong to grouping-managed crosswalks and customer-loaded crosswalks.

This behavior allows you to store additional business data on the generated group entity, such as an externally assigned score, external reference ID, head-of-household flag, or other enrichment data that must remain available after group membership changes.

Protected values remain on the entity because the grouping service does not delete their crosswalks during recalculation. The grouping service does not re-post protected values as part of the recalculation request.

Behavior when a group is dissolved

When a group becomes empty or is otherwise dissolved, the grouping service evaluates whether the group entity contains any customer-loaded values.

A detached entity is no longer tracked by the grouping service, and its relations to group members are removed as part of the existing disband flow. The detached entity remains available through standard entity APIs.

Behavior during group merge and split

The grouping service applies the same ownership rules during merge and split operations.

Important considerations

The following table lists important conditions and limitations for this feature.

Troubleshooting notes

The following table describes common outcomes and likely causes.

Related topics

For more information, see Configure grouping types.

For more information about crosswalk behavior, see Crosswalks.

For more information about entity updates, see Update entities.