CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I'm very excited to find that in CiviCRM 3.3.3 I can set up a membership type and can choose multiple relationships from the pulldown. I started with choosing both "Household Member Is" and "Household Member Of" and then gave a membership to a person A, who was a member of household 1. Not only did the membership propagate up to the household, which now is "Family (by relationship)", but in addition, it propagated back down to Persons B and C, who were also household members. So 1 membership and 3 "by relationship" memberships were created by the single action.

To test just how far this would go, I created a new membership type with the relationship field set to all of the following household relationships: Child of, Head of Household for, Head of Household is, Household Member is, Household Member of, Parent of, Sibling of, Spouse of. I revoked the membership above and gave one of the household members one of these new memberships. Once again all three household members, plus the household were credited with a membership. When I added two more contacts, a child of one of the members and a sibling of that new child, two more memberships "by relationship" were added, even though that last child was "five degrees of separation" from the primary member. This is FANTASTIC and seems to be the answer to many of the problems with households that we've been struggling with as we try to flesh out a test system to determine how we will use Drupal/Civi.

HOWEVER, I find that if I want to change the relationships(s) for a particular membership type, the edit form only LISTS the relationship(s) I initially set, and no longer has a pull down to choose different or more relationships.

I'm worried that the only way to add or change the relationships is to delete the membership type, and create a new one. I'm sure that would create havoc, so I'm a bit nervous about using this great capability.

Anyone know whether it will be possible to edit and modify the relationships field in a membership type in the future? I wonder if I could legitimately edit the SQL membership type table, but that's really beyond my knowledge level and I don't know what I might be breaking.

Rick - We don't currently support changing the "inheritance rules" for a membership type once there are one or more memberships added for that type. The main reason is that any modification to the list of inherited relationship types would also require:

* scanning all existing memberships to see which "by relationship" memberships are no longer valid, and then expiring or removing them
* scanning all relationships of the added relationship type(s) to see what memberships need to be created to meet the new rules

Obviously this is possible, but non-trivial - so I assume folks using this feature currently are trying to plan comprehensively up front for what relationships they want to support (and perhaps adding another membership type later if needed to support additional relationships).

If being able to modify this property is critical for your organization / use cases perhaps you can contribute a patch for this.

I just recalled one thing that I believe I found to be true. In some small tests, I found that I wasn't permitted to delete a membership category if there were any instances of that membership category in the database. I had to manually delete each of the membership events BEFORE deleting the membership. So I am apparently wrong about "automating" the first step by merely deleting the membership category. Am I right about being wrong on this?