Many-to-many relation question

[tvandesande]

Hi all,

i'm implementing a SugarCRM in my company, but i've found a touch challenge for me to figure out. I hope i'll get some assistance from You guys.
So... in my CRM Contacts would act as basically Contacts - so people. Then Accounts would act as Organizations that people (Contacts) belong to. And here's a challenge, i need to be able to assign a person to multiple organizations. So a contact would be associated with one or more Accounts.

would this be possible?
can anyone help please?

greetings
piotr

[tvandesande]

No one knows?

[bchardon]

Hello,

With a little customization work, this is possible.
Currently, the link between contacts and accounts seems to be many-to-one, but by editing the vardefs (several posts on this subjects in the forum and the wiki), you can turn it into a many-to-many relationship.

[tvandesande]

@bchardon thanks for reply, i really appreciate this! i'll take a look into this.

anyone else has some info on implementing many-to-many relation?

[andopes]

Hi, tvandesande

The relationship between Accounts and Contacts are many-to-many.

Sugar automatically gets the first Accounts linked to a Contact and defines it as the Account Name for that Contact.
But it does not mean the relationship is one-to-many.
You can link as Accounts you wish to the same contact.
To avoid get confusing you could remove from editviewdefs.php and detailviewdefs.php the account_name.

Cheers

[DragonflyMaster]

Hi,
maybe you could be interested in adding an accounts subpanel inside a contact, so you can see which accounts a contact is related to.

[tvandesande]

yes i've just realised that there is many to many relation there but it doesn't quite work as i'd like it to.

basically if i have a contact, and want to assign it to lets say 3 accounts, then three copies of this contact are created one for each account. and i'd like to have just one.

[DragonflyMaster]

yes i've just realised that there is many to many relation there but it doesn't quite work as i'd like it to.

basically if i have a contact, and want to assign it to lets say 3 accounts, then three copies of this contact are created one for each account. and i'd like to have just one.

What happens is not actually a new contact creation for each new related account, but just a new line addition to contact's listview page for each account.
My workaround consists in a little hack:
open <sugar-root>/modules/Contacts/vardefs.php
and delete/comment the following code:

 'account_name' =>
        array (
            'name' => 'account_name',
            'rname' => 'name',
            'id_name' => 'account_id',
            'vname' => 'LBL_ACCOUNT_NAME',
            'join_name'=>'accounts',
            'type' => 'relate',
            'link' => 'accounts',
            'table' => 'accounts',
            'isnull' => 'true',
            'module' => 'Accounts',
            'dbType' => 'varchar',
            'len' => '255',
            'source' => 'non-db',
            'unified_search' => true,
        ),
    'account_id' =>
        array (
            'name' => 'account_id',
            'rname' => 'id',
            'id_name' => 'account_id',
            'vname' => 'LBL_ACCOUNT_ID',
            'type' => 'relate',
            'table' => 'accounts',
            'isnull' => 'true',
            'module' => 'Accounts',
            'dbType' => 'id',
            'reportable'=>false,
            'source' => 'non-db',
            'massupdate' => false,
            'duplicate_merge'=> 'disabled',
            'hideacl'=>true,

        ), 
  

Then clear template data cache and rebuild relationships.