Handling different contact types: Best practices?

[iparker]

Hello,

I’m new using SuiteCRM and I want to figure out what’s a good solution to realize our requirement.

We have two different kind of customers/contacts (employers and employees) - both individual persons, but with different data.

What is a good way to save and handle these contacts? Should I add kind of type-field to contacts to differ between these groups?

Or is it better to create a different entity/data type (I think this is called module in SuiteCRM) to handle this?

Are there any disadvantage in creating a new module, for example that it is not possible to send emails or start campaigns with the new type of contacts?

Thanks for some help with this!

Best regards,

Timo

[p.konetskiy]

@iparker
Welcome to community!

I think that the each contact is a human and it’s a one object. You can make different view forms for different records of one object. But you can do it creating custom files only without tool Studio. It’s standartd for SuiteCRM options. It will be compatible with upgrade.

If you decided to create new object you should write code for object Campaing because the object Campaing has some extended option for standard SuiteCRM object. It will be difficult to do compatible with upgrade.

[iparker]

Hello,

thanks for your reply and the nice greeting.

So what is the best way to differ between these contact types? Create a custom select-field to choose this type?

Is there a possibility to create two different lists to separate these types?

Best regards,

Timo

[p.konetskiy]

@iparker

So what is the best way to differ between these contact types? Create a custom select-field to choose this type?

Yes. Look at the posts. You can make different forms for different contact types.

Custom View depending field value

@peted I recommend don’t change function ‘preDisplay’. Make function ‘getMetaDataFile’ in file …/view.detail.php /* add */ public function getMetaDataFile() { if ($this->bean->order_type == "Repair" || $this->bean->order_type == "Other" || $this->bean->order_type == "Stock") { $oldType = $this->type; $this->type = $oldType . 'ros'; } $metadataFile = parent::getMetaDataFile(); if ($this->bean->order_type == "Repair" || $this->bea…

Custom View depending field value

@peted Without problems. Add new form to the function ‘display’ to file …/view.detail.php: public function display(){ if ($this->bean->order_type == "Repair" || $this->bean->order_type == "Other" || $this->bean->order_type == "Stock") { $this->dv->formName='DetailView_ros'; } parent::display(); }

@iparker

Is there a possibility to create two different lists to separate these types?

When you make several forms each of them can have different fields.