CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi
Here is the scenario: We are using Joomla/Civicrm. We have imported 1600 schools as organisation contacts. We have worked out a way for a Joomla front-end user to create new users who are students. We need to find a way to more or less automatically associate them with the school. We were planning on using the employee/employer relationship. When editing the student profile in the back end of civicrm, the 'Current Employer' field has a search facility that searches the existing organisation contacts as soon as you start to type. Can this be implemented in a Joomla front end profile/form?

Thanks in advance for any tips.

There's a way to do this, but it involves either a) writing some custom code, or b) not using relationships.  You can create a custom field of type "Contact Reference", limit it to schools, and give anonymous users access to contact reference fields.

You can either:
* Stop there, and use the contact reference field instead of the relationship to associate your students with the schools.  This actually works pretty well.
* If for whatever reason you also want the relationship, you can write a small CiviCRM extension based on hook_civicrm_custom such that whenever a that field receives a value, it automatically generates a relationship.