The Deletion Priorities can be accessed via Job/Setup>Matching Setup>Deletion Priorities. When you select this option, you browse PRIORITY.DBF and can view or change the various deletion rules. The fields you see when browsing the Deletion Priorities table are Field_Name, Field_Val, Field_Pri and Comment. The records in this table are in descending value of priority – in other words, rules that most increase the likelihood of a record being kept are at the top, with rules that most reduce it being kept at the bottom.
You can find more information on this subject by visiting the following link: Deletion Priorities
Setting deletion priorities allows the user to choose which records to keep or delete depending on the content of each record and which fields the User deems more important.
One useful example is when a User is attempting to dedupe a single file with a hierarchical source code. By adding a Source Code field (in this example scode) in the deletion priorities, setting the field value and then assigning each value a different priority, this will ensure that duplicate records with a higer priority source code are kept over dupes with a lower source code. Please see the example below.
FIELD_NAME FIELD_VAL FIELD_PRI COMMENT
scode H 3000 H=High / scode=Source Code (can be user defined field name and value)
scode M 2000 M=Medium
scode L 1000 L=Low
In this case, records with a “H” in the “scode” field would be kept as they have a higher priority. The field names and values are all relative to each User’s situation.
Note that the more important the field in determining the deletion priority, the higher you should set the Field_Pri value. It is the sum of all fields which determines the priority thus if scode ‘H’ shown above has priority over everything else it’s FIELD_PRI value should be significantly higher than the summed value of all the other fields in the priority list.