Currently, the email settings, including "Require contacts to have a valid email address" apply to all bundles of the contact entity. In order to take advantage of the RedHen functions that keep a user account and a related contact record linked by email and synchronized, this setting must be TRUE. This synchronization functionality is very useful, but being able to track contacts that may not have email addresses could still be useful even though emails are required for a subset of contacts.

This would be useful to many types of associations. One use case would be a church. Many members will have accounts and should be able to manage their contact information on the website. However, some members will not and may never have an email address. Perhaps these members will not participate on the website - it is reasonable to require anyone with a website account to have an email address, but we still need contact information for people that don't have website accounts or email addresses.

Allowing these email settings to be specific to contact bundles will expand RedHen capability to meet this requirement.

Comments

ahillio’s picture

ahillio commented

++on this feature request :)

We have parents (parent contact bundle) registering their kids (child contact bundle) for summer camps. Parent contacts need to be synced with user accounts, but the children don't have email addresses.

ahillio’s picture

ahillio commented

With this bit of code we're setting "kid" types of contacts so they don't require email addresses while other contact bundles do...

function custom_module_field_attach_validate($entity_type, $entity, &$errors) {
        if ($entity_type == 'redhen_contact') {
                $redhen_contact_type = $entity->type;
                if ($redhen_contact_type == 'kid') {
                        foreach($errors as $field => $error) {
                                $remove_error = true;
                                foreach($error['und'][0] as $index => $err) {
                                        if ($err['message'] != t('At least one email is required.')) {
                                                $remove_error = false;
                                        }
                                }
                                if ($remove_error) { unset($errors[$field]); } 
                        } 
                } 
        } 
}

Not sure if that's the most proper way to achieve this, but it seems to work without breaking things.

danair’s picture

danair commented

This method is basically suppressing the error reporting, which may be effective but might it create a problem of non-unique records? Perhaps that's not an issue in your implementation but there's a reason why email address is used as the unique identifier.

ahillio’s picture

ahillio commented

Oh, thanks for pointing that out. The guy who wrote that for me said it might cause problems. I'm not sure where the problems would emerge... perhaps in deduping? I'll post back if I encounter any.

I wonder what the proper way of doing this would be?

danair’s picture

danair commented

I'm not sure if an issue would ever occur. It would be fantastic if it would be possible to automatically link the RedHen contact to the Drupal user as long as there is a valid email address.