CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

All my CiviMember Membership Types have a Relationship Type of "IndividualMember" to our organisation as defined in this relationship.

     Relationship Label-A to B     IndividualMember
     Relationship Label-B to A     HasMember
     Contact Type A                 Individuals
     Contact Type B                 Organizations

Most of the existing contacts have an "IndividualMember" relationship to the organisation and therefore the organisation inherits that membership.

For example: Jo Smith is an "IndividualMember" of the organisation and has "Standard" membership. When I update his membership the organisation inherits his "Standard" membership. This means that the organisation can have hundreds of memberships, all of which are inherited.

However if I add a new contact and assign "Standard" membership to him, then a relationship has not been setup and there is no inheritance.

The bulk of the members where created with version prior to the current CiviCRM 1.7.beta.9239 (dang, I'm still on a beta) Joomla 1.1.2 / PHP 4 / SQL 4. I’ve only noticed this behaviour when changing users on 1.7 and don’t remember this behaviour on 1.6.

The upshot is that all my membership reports (and the BIRT examples) now include these duplicates. I could just filter them out but really want to understand what is happening here.

Apologies for being dim, but I've read the documentation and can't see anything on this.

Question 1 - I’m assuming that members should have a relationship with the organisation they are members of but don’t understand why they need to inherit the memberships. Why does the organisation inherit memberships to itself and can I disable it?

Question 2 - Should new users be automagically given this relationship?

Question 3 – Am I missing the point here somewhere?

Thanks Dave, Everything makes sense now. Most of the memberships were set up in v1.5 and I've just been adding new and renewed memberships.

One question - is there a script / method to normalise the data by going through each membership and updating the inherited memberships? Not a big deal if there isn't as in time all memberships will need to be renewed.