CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi Ed - Good set of questions, not blundering at all :-). Bottom line is that the 'permissioning by relationship' functionality is pretty primitive still - and there are some 'hoped for' improvements in the way editing 'related contacts' and shared addresses work - all of which are awaiting some sponsorships / patches etc from interested folks :-)

Specific thoughts on best approaches given current functionality:

1. Where a member (Individual) is part of a Household and has rights to edit the household, it appears on their dashboard and they can go to the household (fine.) If the household doesn't have edit rights over that person, the household's dashboard reports that there are no relationships (including no relationship with the person who has just come there via a relationship listed in their dashboard). I'd expect it to say that the relationship exists, but just not to give an "edit" option.

The relationship permissioning is 'View and Edit' - which is why we don't show the household -> household member relationship from the unpermissioned household side. As noted above, this functionality probably needs to be built out a bit at some point (at least to separate the View and Edit permissions).

2. Where a member (Individual) looks at their dashboard, there appears to be no option to edit their own details (address, etc). If they go to the related household, they can update the address there if on a household address. Once in that household (permissions permitting) they can then use the 'edit householders' type option to edit their own name/phone/address i.e. the way for a member to edit their details via the dashboard is to go to their household and back - they can't do it direct. That doesn't seem intuitive.

3. Where you update your details via a profile, it appears to rely on three profiles - a name profile, a phone/email one and an address one. Is it possible to specify what profiles it uses (so I can get it to use one with my custom fields etc), or do I have to edit particular existing profiles (and if so, what are these, so I don't cause problems elsewhere)?

2 and 3 are kind of related. The form you get to when clicking 'Edit Contact Information" from 'My Contacts' is a hard-coded form, not a profile. Enhancements are needed to allow admins to link Profiles to the Contact Dashboard editing screens so that links to edit Households and / or Orgs and / or the logged in contact's own record can be exposed and the linked edit forms can be modified by modifying the linked Profile. This is a needed feature - would be great if folks would step up and sponsor it :-)

A partial workaround is to create a customized version of the main Contact Dashboard template - CRM/Contact/Page/View/UserDashBoard.tpl - and add a prominent link for the contact to edit their own details - pointing to a profile of your choosing (i.e. civicrm/profile/edit?gid=N&reset=1). If you create a dedicated profile for this purpose, you can set the Redirect and Cancel URLs in the profile's advanced settings to go back to the contact dashboard.

For the 'related contact' editing, this is a bit harder, since the links in the listing of related contacts are part of a shared template - also used by Relationship tabs. However if you have access to some PHP skills, hooks could be used to modify / add your custom fields to the hard coded 'Related Contact' form (CRM/Contact/Form/RelatedContact.php).

4. How can I flag to a user that the address he is shown is a household address? It may be useful to the user to know the knock on effect of what they are doing but since not everyone has this I can't just put it in the notes.

There are some improvements 'in the queue' for Shared Address handling - one of which includes clearly marking 'shared addresses' while editing. Currently these are scheduled for 3.3. As usual, if important to you - sponsoring or contributing resources can help make them happen sooner.

http://issues.civicrm.org/jira/browse/CRM-3156
http://issues.civicrm.org/jira/browse/CRM-4572

One final question - the dashboard is too wide: where is the css for it so that I can force it to be a bit narrower?