CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

If I'm in the wrong place/forum/sub-forum please let me know... I'm setting up a "proof of concept" CiviCRM installation on Joomla. Right now I'm working with CiviCRM 3.2.5 and Joomla 1.5.22. I plan to upgrade to CiviCRM 3.3.1 (or whatever is current) when I actually deploy the project to a live box (unless something I need is there now)

Basically we have the following: Most of the organizations in our case are Agencies that have several "Talents" (prospective employees) that work for them and also have one or more Agents (employees of the Agency). We also have Clients with Staff that can search for Talents. We have a master list of Agencies that we work with that we're going to import whether or not they have active Talent listed with us. So far I've created Individual Contact Types for Talent, Agents and Staff. I've created Organization Contact Types for Clients and Agencies. I've created relationships for Talent-Agency and Agent-Agency as well as Client-Staff. I've been able to make it so that Talent, via a CiviCRM profile, can create their Contact Card (and attached Joomla account). Using their account they can log in and update their "Bio" which is searchable by Staff. I've also set it up so that Talent can register for various Work Shops we offer (using CiviEvent). Right now we are manually managing Client access but plan to migrate to CiviMember for that.

I had to do some custom PHP pages so that Talent could select the right Agency since there are issues making the "Current Employer" field searchable on a Profile... but it works. When registration is done the Talent is tied to the right Agency.

So here's where I'm stuck... I'm lumping these questions together since almost all of them revolve around CiviCRM Relationships.

1. When our staff creates an Agent's contact card in the backend how can I have CiviCRM create the attached Joomla account AND while I see how I can do it manually is there a way that by default that in the Agent-Agency relationship I can give the Agent the ability to edit the Agency's information? (If we could revoke it but it would be enabled by default that would be even better)

2. Is there a way that Agents could edit the information for Talent registered at their Agency via the Joomla front end? I know Talent can already edit their info since I have done that.

3. When I use a profile to have the Talent create their contact cards on the Joomla front end the relationship is Organization-Individual even though the profile used to create the contact card specifies that the Individual is sub-type "Talent" and the Organization is sub-type "Agency". Similarly if I manually create an Agent the relationship type is Org-Individual... Is there some way to make those relationships "smart" since I spent the time to flag the relationship as valid only for the correct contact sub-types?

4. When I get to the point of reports is it going to be "evil" try and get Agent information to print on the same page as Talent info?

5. When I import our existing data am I suspect I'm going to need to import it twice... once to get the Talent-Agency information and then again to get the Agency-Agent linkage. Right now the data is "flat". That is to say in our old FoxPro app we have Talent-Agency-Agent on a single record. The Agent on the record is the primary for that Talent so we might have Ten Talent records for Agency A with two Agents each on five records...

6. Once we get all the importing done I fully expect we could end up with three copies of each Agency (one from our master list, one from the Talent-Agency import, and one from the Agency-Agent import). If I go into Find and Merge Duplicate Contacts and change the Strict matching (to look at whatever field we put the Agency ID in will that be used "always" including imports?

7. If I do need to manually merging Agencies because duplicates are created the wiki talks about finding duplicates and setting up rules but it doesn't explicitly say... when I merge Agencies will ALL the various "other" things get merged? I'm most worried about relationships but since I'm new to CiviCRM I don't know what else I should "want" to be merged...

I think that's it for now...

Thanks in advance!

Matt

Some specific comments inline ...

1. When our staff creates an Agent's contact card in the backend how can I have CiviCRM create the attached Joomla account AND while I see how I can do it manually is there a way that by default that in the Agent-Agency relationship I can give the Agent the ability to edit the Agency's information? (If we could revoke it but it would be enabled by default that would be even better)

2. Is there a way that Agents could edit the information for Talent registered at their Agency via the Joomla front end? I know Talent can already edit their info since I have done that.

Relationships include a simple "view and update information for ..." flag. If you set that for the Agent on the Agency, and expose the CiviCRM (Contact) Dashboard as a front-end menu item, then Agents will see a link to update a basic set of fields for the Agency on their Dashboard.  The same mechanism should work for Agent -> Talent.

Note that the form the Agent's get is currently "hard-coded". There is a Make it Happen initiative to allow this to be controlled via a Profile which would make it much more useful / powerful.

http://civicrm.org/index.php?q=civicrm/contribute/transact&reset=1&id=2&widgetID=1

3. When I use a profile to have the Talent create their contact cards on the Joomla front end the relationship is Organization-Individual even though the profile used to create the contact card specifies that the Individual is sub-type "Talent" and the Organization is sub-type "Agency". Similarly if I manually create an Agent the relationship type is Org-Individual... Is there some way to make those relationships "smart" since I spent the time to flag the relationship as valid only for the correct contact sub-types?

Not sure how you're doing the above - but you'll probably need to use hooks to get the right / expected behavior from a profile (since afaik only the Employer relationship can be created via profile out of the box). Check out some of lobo's posts on CiviSchool module / extending profiles to display and update a variety of relationships.

4. When I get to the point of reports is it going to be "evil" try and get Agent information to print on the same page as Talent info?

Suspect you'll need to build your own report for this using the CiviReport framework. If you do so, you can share it with others as an "extension".
http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC33/CiviReport+structure+and+customization
http://civicrm.org/blogs/michal/civicrm-extensions-framework-packaging-custom-reports

6. Once we get all the importing done I fully expect we could end up with three copies of each Agency (one from our master list, one from the Talent-Agency import, and one from the Agency-Agent import). If I go into Find and Merge Duplicate Contacts and change the Strict matching (to look at whatever field we put the Agency ID in will that be used "always" including imports?

7. If I do need to manually merging Agencies because duplicates are created the wiki talks about finding duplicates and setting up rules but it doesn't explicitly say... when I merge Agencies will ALL the various "other" things get merged? I'm most worried about relationships but since I'm new to CiviCRM I don't know what else I should "want" to be merged...

Import uses the configured default "Strict" rule for the contact type you are importing. Merge allows you to select the related data that you want to "move" to merged contact record.