Unique Properties support for newly created Contact properties

[dennisedson]

What’s changing?

Up until now, a user could not set a contact property to be unique.  Starting September 21st, we will begin rolling out the ability to set new contact properties to be unique.    

Why is this changing?

Historically, HubSpot has provided unique property support for Companies, Deals, Tickets, and Custom Objects; however, Contact records have solely relied on email properties for uniqueness enforcement.  Admin users are now empowered to create unique custom properties for Contacts via the UI and developers can do the same via the Properties API, allowing customers to have even more control over their Contacts data. Going forward, HubSpot users can now leverage unique properties to eliminate duplicate records and maintain clean, reliable Contact data.

What do I need to know?

1. Only net new properties can be set to contain a unique value.
2. Similar to the other object types, the contact object type can only have a maximum of 10 unique properties. 
3. When converting visitors to a contact record, we will drop any visitor property values that would violate unique property constraints.  More information on identifying a visitor available in our developer documentation and knowledgebase.
4. At the time of this post, the Import tool does not adhere to this new standard, yet.  It should be updated in the coming weeks to meet the requirements.

[NSmits-Jørgen9]

This is great! I'm using this for Tax ID's. If I enforce the unique value and use this on a form, does it mean the company record will be updated based on the same tax ID already in the CRM or does this not work?

[dennisedson]

@NSmits-Jørgen9 , 

This specific release was for contacts.  It already existed for companies.  Not sure if you mean if a customer has a unique tax id, will it update a company.  That would not work, but I am most likely misinterpreting your question. 

Here is a link to a knowledgebase article on deduplication

[Marie_]

I desperately need this feature for the phone number field. Are there any plans to enable this on an existing property, specifically this field? thanks

[dmklein]

Does this mean that the contact object no longer has to be unique on email address? In other words, if I create a unique property for customer id then I can populate into contact object the following rows (without deduping)?

record 1:

customer id = 1

email = foo@bar.com

record 2:

customer id = 2

email = foo@bar.com

Thanks!

[dennisedson]

@dmklein , at this time, email still needs to be unique

[TCable]

Today is September 25th and I still the message that this is not available for contacts.  Do I need to do anything to activate this change?

[dennisedson]

@TCable , The rollout should be complete by tomorrow.  Let me know if you still cannot get access to this after that!

[CDean]

This is great.  Is there a way to use this unique value to update contacts via the API?

[dennisedson]

@CDean , 

If you are asking if you can use this unique value as the idProperty to find a contact, then yes, you can!

eg: 
https://api.hubapi.com/crm/v3/objects/contacts/eggs?idProperty=snowflake