Contact roles

[judgej]

I cannot see a way to specify a role in the relationship between a contact and an account. Is there a way to do that that perhaps I am not seeing?

For example, I would like to say which contact handles payments, which handles deliveries, which deals with specifications etc.

Those contacts may have other roles against other accounts, so this is a property of the relationship, not a property of the contact individual.

Some contacts may also have multiple roles against a single account.

-- Jason

[judgej]

Here is a more concrete example:

I have a university and a student, both as accounts. The student is linked to the university.

At the university there is a professor as a contact. His role will be "head of department X".

The student purchases a service, which is delivered by me but with some help from the university. In order to help, the same professor is then assigned as a contact to the student account. The role in that case will be "course contact".

Part of the service the student gets will involve a trip abroad. To do that we need some emergency contacts, and these make sense to be set up as further contacts to the student account, this time with roles "emergency contact".

That is the kind of structure I am trying to model.

[kinunt]

I think you are looking something similar to this:

http://www.sugarcrm.com/forums/showthread.php?t=67742

[judgej]

I think you are looking something similar to this:

http://www.sugarcrm.com/forums/showthread.php?t=67742

Thanks - that sounds spot on. That looks like a good solution - rather than using the built-in contact relationships, create one of my own to use instead, with a many-to-many table called "contact roles" to sit in the middle. I can then add whatever custom fields I like to the "contact roles" table.

(I suspect the terminology is "module" here rather than "table" - still getting used to the way Sugar does stuff.)

It's a shame Sugar does not allow its own built-in contact/account relationship table to be extended like this, because I can see it being very useful in many circumstances. The table is there, but it simply is not exposed as a module. Maybe it can be extended programmatically?

-- Jason