CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hello all,
I'm just enjoying the new sub-contact type feature, well done those who've been working on it. My understanding is that there are no plans currently to allow the creation of new top level contact types (i.e individual,organisation) and that it is also not possible to assign more than one sub-type to a contact. So for example, to use the categories from the documentation, if a contact is both a teacher and a parent or a parent and a governor, there will be no way to represent this in the database. Is my understand correct on this?
My solution I see thus far is to have very general categories, create various custom data groups and then control the visibility of these through by group (and use groups to define subcategories). However under this method we loose many of the advantages (such as search refinement and mapping) that sub-categories seems to give.

So we can try to plan our data to make best use of future changes I have two quick questions.

• a) Has anyone come up with another solution?
• b) Do the developers have any thoughts on the future of subcategories. Are we looking at cascading type (i.e sub-sub-categories) e.g an organisation could be an food producer, which would then be split down further into primary production and processing with questions getting more specific on the way down. Or are multiple sub-categories more likely?

 :-[Sorry for the long post and thanks in advance for any thoughts,
Durruti

Hi Lobo,
Thanks very much for the response.
We are currently awaiting a response on funding but would potentially be interested in sponsoring some work on this. I've been back through the documentation on categorisation by other methods and your first piece of advice "Don't over think it" is interesting, as you can switch a group to a tag and vice versa.
My understanding is that sub-categories are not as flexible (in terms of switching about) so perhaps it worth leaving them out of schema at the moment for those who have more complicated setups?
Thanks again,
Durruti