CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

After some IRC discussion with Lobo I played around on the demo site a bit more.  I didn't see the same issue, but a similar (posibly related) problem occurred on there:

1. Created Custom Data Group (called Relationship Details) used for Relationship, selected sub type "Child of"; saved.

2. Added Alphanumeric Custom Field to Group called "Parenting Strategy"; saved.

3. Went back to settings of Relationship Details Data Group and changed title of Group to Relationship; saved, which worked unlike on my own install.

4. Went to settings of Data Group again and selected sub type "Parent of" in addition to "Child of" already selected; saved.

5. Checked http://drupal.demo.civicrm.org/civicrm/admin/custom/group/?action=browse and noted that "Type" of my Group was "Child of, Child of" not "Child of, Parent of" as selected when I edited the settings.

6. Went back into settings of Data Group and only "Child of" is selected in the list of sub-types, "Parent of" not selected at all.

Cheers,
Erica.

Erica,

Did some research today, and looks you are right in the sense that its related to child-of/parent-of. Here is what's happening -

1. Child-of and Parent-of are basically same relationship type but different directions a->b and b->a. And since custom groups just record the type id, the same id is recorded twice.

2. Now you go and edit a relationship whose type is child/parent-of. And even if you save the relationship without any custom info it creates an entry in the custom table with empty values.

4. On custom group settings screen, the policy/rule is to NOT allow removing any subtypes, if there is already some entry (even with null / empty values) in the custom table for a particular used-for field (e.g relationship here).
And i suspect you already have some, and one solution is to empty the custom table.

5. When custom group settings form loads with only one relationship type selected i.e child of since id is same (for both child & parent) and when you hit save, form detects that there were two ids initially and thinks that you trying to remove one subtype (when there is already some entry present in the custom table) and therefore throws that error.

So there are two issues -
#5 -> where solution could be - making child of & parent of (same rel type) appear in same row in the subtype selector e.g "Child Of / Parent Of". Please file an issue for this.

#4 -> empty values being considered as data present. This is not a simple / clean fix.