Problem/Motivation

I want to create hybrid contact bundles where the contact may be a company or an individual.

Currently crm_contact is laid out with a name field that is hidden for person contact bundle, but visible for organisation and household.

Proposed resolution

Add the full name field to all bundles and have a boolean field to confirm whether entity is person or organisation, and conditionally show the field based on the results.

User interface changes

Add a boolean field to confirm whether contact is an individual or organisation and toggle visibility of full name field based on this.

Comments

naheemsays created an issue. See original summary.

jdleonard’s picture

jdleonard
he/him
Primary language English
Location Austin, Texas
commented

I'd love to learn more about your use case. What are you trying to achieve with a hybrid Contact Type that can't be achieved with the Person and Organization Contact Types?

naheemsays’s picture

naheemsays commented

I am building a legal case management system with crm and crm_case as its foundation.

Each case as multiple correspondent entities, which then refer to a crm_contact entity and add fields for contact name, email and telephone number which are case specific.

I have around 20 crm_contact entity bundles including client and other party and expert, and solicitor, however these are not always either a person or a company/organisation.

jdleonard’s picture

jdleonard
he/him
Primary language English
Location Austin, Texas
commented
Status: Active » Closed (won't fix)

Cool use case! Thank you for that context.

Person is designed to be used for any Contact that represents a human. Drupal CRM is opinionated about this in part because Person is the only Contact Type that can be mapped to a User. For most use cases, the three built-in Contact Types (Person, Organization, and Household) are sufficient. While one is free to create additional Contact Types, it is generally ill-advised. What if a given human is both a client (for one case) and an expert (for another case)? Having two Contacts representing the same human necessitates duplication of information and could be otherwise problematic.

I can't see us adding "a boolean field to confirm whether entity is person or organisation" because this is already represented by whether a Contact's bundle is "Person". Similarly, the Full Name field only applies to the Person Contact Type because first/middle/last/etc wouldn't make sense for a non-human (okay, maybe a pet?)

It sounds like your use of many Contact Types is mostly to facilitate tracking different sets of information for different subsets of Persons / Organizations. There are existing feature requests that may solve for that (a Contact Profile or similar could be attached to some Persons and some Organizations as appropriate):
#3577342: Contact Profile (crm_contact_profile)
#3557244: Contact Type fieldable sub-types

I encourage you to contribute to the other feature requests as you are able.

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