Author Topic: Multiple Contacts per "individual" - including prefix/suffix etc (Read 1417 times)

Sansui · July 14, 2009, 12:15:02 pm

I've been trying to figure out how to set up this organization's contact records. Each organization has two contacts, but there is only one account. In this case, I'm wanting to simply have another profile for the secondary contact that has its own fields/address.

This is not a problem with locations, as civicrm provides for multiple locations right out of the box. I have created a custom data set for first, middle, last name as alphanumeric fields, but looks like I can't create suffix/prefix fields?

I'm guessing the expected behavior is that I would set up an additional contact that would hold the secondary contact's info, and then be associated to the business account as a relationship? For simplicity sake, we wanted them on the same record, and we do not want an additional drupal account created. Any suggestions, or are separate contact records required anytime you want multiple people listed for an account?

Sansui · July 14, 2009, 01:17:54 pm

Here's the dilemma I'm facing:

1.) If I can get the secondary contact onto the same individual record, I can export those fields in an export task, but apparently I can't have prefix/suffix fields for my secondary contact
2.) If I set up the secondary contact the "correct" way, by making it it's own record and establishing a relationship, there is no way to export the fields of that related contact in an export task

Kinda screwed either way it seems like

Donald Lobo · July 14, 2009, 03:31:30 pm

i would go with option 2 and write a custom search to export the org and related contacts as one csv file

lobo

Sansui · July 15, 2009, 06:12:18 am

I guess I will go with option 2. For user imports, I guess the related organization field will help cut down the labor involved on the website side, connecting each individual to the organization. For exports, we'll worry about that later and see about a custom export if we have to

Sansui · July 15, 2009, 06:19:32 am

Just another question...

If I set these businesses up as organizations instead of individuals, I have to have three records per organization then - one organization, and two individuals for primary and secondary contacts. The organization and the primary contact both have the same email address. In some cases, the secondary contact might even be the same (if the same individual fulfills all those same roles)

Will those two contact records having the same email address cause any problems in the user system or with drupal accounts?

Edit: ok, I see that there is indeed no way for two contact records to share the same email address. Gah. Since the primary contact email is always the same as the organization email, this gives me another problem :/

Sansui · July 15, 2009, 07:49:02 am

I'm a little confused why these core civicrm fields are so restricted between organization and individuals etc.

If I wanted to create a postal mailing to all the organizations, there's no contact name for attention if I use just the organization records. If I do a custom search for all individuals who have the relationship of the primary contact, then I have to duplicate the mailing address information between both the organization and the primary contact, and duplication sucks.

Everything else has gone so amazingly well with civicrm, between the drupal integration, organic groups integration, and even calendar integration. But these core fields and where they're allocated are so inflexible that I'm having real trouble making it work with how our contacts are organized.

Dave Greenberg · July 15, 2009, 04:41:37 pm

There is an issue on the roadmap (currently scheduled for 3.1) to allow any type of contacts to share addresses. This is intended to generalize and improve the current limited address sharing support (individuals can "use household address"), and support use cases like:

* Individual's Work address is shared with Organization (their employer)
* Two individuals sharing a common address record
etc.

http://issues.civicrm.org/jira/browse/CRM-4572

If you are able to submit a patch for this, it could potentially happen sooner.

With regard to email addresses... Drupal doesn't allow Users to have the same email address AFAIK, but CiviCRM does not have that restriction for Contact records. If you're getting a duplicate warning you can override or modify your Duplicate Contact Matching rules.

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Author Topic: Multiple Contacts per "individual" - including prefix/suffix etc (Read 1417 times)

Sansui

Multiple Contacts per "individual" - including prefix/suffix etc

Sansui

Re: Multiple Contacts per "individual" - including prefix/suffix etc

Donald Lobo

Re: Multiple Contacts per "individual" - including prefix/suffix etc

Sansui

Re: Multiple Contacts per "individual" - including prefix/suffix etc

Sansui

Re: Multiple Contacts per "individual" - including prefix/suffix etc

Sansui

Re: Multiple Contacts per "individual" - including prefix/suffix etc

Dave Greenberg

Re: Multiple Contacts per "individual" - including prefix/suffix etc