CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi guys,
 
Straight to the point:

 I work with a child sponsorship organization. The core of our model is a Many-To-One relationship in which each child in our organization can have one and only one sponsor at any given time. However we also keep a 'sponsorship history' which includes previous sponsors that may have 'dropped' the child for various reasons.... basically exactly the same as the Current Employer/Employee model (a person can also sponsor more than one child)       ... a textbook many-to-one relationship.

Initially I was under the impression that relationships could be connected through the referenced contact custom field type. However there seems to be a difference (thats not clearly defined) between 'Referenced Contacts' and 'Related Contacts'.

SO-  I see that I can create custom relationship definitions.. but I cant seem to restrict them to anything less than a Many to Many relationship... like the Employer/Employee relationship seems to be.

If there is something Ive missed in the GUI please let me know. Ive read through quite a few posts but they dont really seem to address the core relational issue Im dealing with. The only place I ran across something similar was in the 4.1.2 schedule..

Im not a programmer but I can be when I have to.. If there is a way to currently do this in GUI that Im missing please advise.
Else if you can point me in the right direction for related post OR recommend where in the code it would be good to start customizing I would greatly appreciate any help.

Thanks for the reply X

I tried doing just that the first time- created two contact subtypes Child and Person, and created a relationship Sponsored by/Sponsors.

Maybe Im missing something but I wasnt able to figure out how to restrict the relationship to where a child can have only one sponsor at a given time.