Relation dependant field

The backbone of our CRM is the Project. One Project is one house/apartment. Now depending on the stage of the house (planned, being built, finished, leased, etc) the Project can have a number of contacts associated with it.

To help us identify the different contacts, I’ve created a custom field for Contacts, labeling it as “Contact Type.” It’s a simple text field and it’s used to add information like “Owner”, “Tenant”, “Tenants wife”, “Electrician”, “Heating guy”, etc. This does exactly what we need up to this point and we can contact the person we need for a specific case without any issues.

However, now when the “Heating guy” above becomes our client on his own, the things get tricky. Because now for one Project he needs to be marked as the “Owner” or “Tenant” but for X number of other Projects he will still be the “Heating guy.”

Is this something that is doable with the default functionality if so, could someone thrown me a keyword to track down in the User Guide?

Thanks.

In terms of database design, it sounds like “Type” is not a property of the Contact, but of the relationship between the Contact and a Project.

So you could have multiple relationships between a Contact and one or more different Projects, for each relationship there would be a “Relationship Type”.

This is not a strong point of SugarCRM / SuiteCRM, fields in relationships are not something you can do from Studio. They are, however, perfectly implementable with code. It can be challenging to get it right, though…

http://sugarmods.co.uk/how-to-add-custom-fields-to-a-relationship-table-and-display-them-in-a-subpanel-sugarcrm-suitecrm/
https://suitecrm.com/forum/developer-help/8797-how-create-custom-field-on-accounts-contracts-relatiship-module

Good luck