In 4.5 case roles must be individual to individual.

[joanne]

I am not an experienced user of CiviCase, so I am asking on this forum.

Unless I have missed something, it appears that in 4.5 you can only have case roles that are individual to individual relationships.

You can add roles that are individual to organisation to a case, but when you come to assign the role it is only names of individuals that appear in the contact selection box.

Is that how cases always work? 

I understand that it is people who have to interact with the client, but, with no experience of case management, I would have thought that sometimes you might have, say, a sponsoring organisation that you want to link to the case.

[demeritcowboy]

I do know that originally orgs couldn't be assigned as clients, so whenever that addition was made probably the corresponding role code was never updated. Ideally it would limit roles to the A-to-B (B-to-A?) types that correspond to the client type.

I don't remember the original reason for it, although looking at old wiki spec documents it suggests the original intention may have been partly for access control which I could see being a little more complex with relationships to orgs, but it may also have just been a decision of the form "we don't need it now and there's more important things to fit into the budget".

As a workaround, depending on the situation, an org that has a role in a case is likely to be involved with several cases, e.g. your law firm, so you can add the org to the global case contacts group (as defined in settings.xml) and it will appear on every case.

[Betty Dolfing]

On a case when you use 'Add a new role' indeed you can only choose a relationship type of an individual.

As a workaround you can add the relationshiptype of an organisation in your XML under Case roles, so that it pops up in the tab with roles on the case. When applicable you can add the specific organisation on the case.

<CaseRoles>
    <RelationshipType>
        <name>Sponsor organisation</name>
    </RelationshipType>

[joanne]

I am not sure we are all talking about the same thing.

I don't want to now how to get around  the issue as I don't use CiviCase on a production site.

I have been testing the new 4.5 case configuration UI to write the documentation and I am just stating the situation and asking if that will be problem for people that do use CiviCase. 

The situation is:
In 4.5 you can only use case roles that are individual to individual.  You can add a case roles that is individual to organisation in the case type (eg Sponsoring Company), but when you want to fill that role you can only select from individuals and, of course, this gives an error and can't be saved. 

[Coleman Watts]

Agree that this restriction does not make sense and it ought to be relatively easy to remove it.

[Coleman Watts]

This fixes it along with a couple other misc improvements to that screen:
https://github.com/civicrm/civicrm-core/pull/4060

[Aahar]

Will this be a part of next release.
Seems there have been releases after 5th Sept 2014 and this patch has not made it into the latest releases.

How can I help in this?

[Coleman Watts]

I just tried it in 4.5 as well as 4.6 and it is working as I would expect. As a test I added the "employer of" role to a case type, and then it prompted me to add an organization to that role (individual and household were not allowed, as I expected).