Hi John,

First of all, thanks for all this great support!

Secondly, I have looked through the forums but haven't found this topic: I need to create two different types of Contacts based on the main "Company" name. I have a business where we are dealing with families.

The Family Unit is the main catagory and basically I just need one field (name) and probably a customer number. In each family, there can be multiple households (e.g. Mother's house and Father's house, with various step-parents). Also in each family can be multiple children; those children can also have multiple contact opportunities (email, cell phone, etc.). I'd also like to relate all history for each of these contacts to one tab.

I need to record different information for the first contact type (Parents) than the second contact type (Children). There are many times that we need to record three or even four parent/guardians for one or multiple children. So ideally I would like to add a portal where we can display each parent and another portal where we can display each child.

What do I add, and what do I relate it to, to get this to work properly?

BTW, I'm loving the new update!

Hi.

Sounds like you might want to create new tables "above" the contacts table we have now. These tables would be Family and Household so that our existing contact's table would fit in like this:

Family --< Households --< Contacts

This preserves the phone/fax/email and appointment (notes) attributes we already have for contacts and also lets you see the notes for all a household's contacts (for instance) at the household level by going through contacts.

At this point you could either tag some contacts as parents and some as children or you may want to create a new table for joining contacts to each other so that you can describe the relationship between them. This join table would let you create a record linking Contact A to Contact B where B is A's son, and another record linking B to A where A is B's mother. This would probably let you do the portal you describe where you can see all the guardian's for each child or all the children for a guardian.

Hope that helps get you started.

Okay, I'll try that. I think I understand enough to give that a shot.

Follow up question: Is there a way to have a layout within a layout?

In your contact layout, each company and contact is a new record. For my application that is quite clumsy, since I want to see one Family at a time.

Ideally, I'd like to list my "company" (Family) along with all it's contacts (both types: parents and students) on one layout, with Parents being in one tab and Students being in another tab.

For example: So in a family layout, the first tab is Parents - in the Parent tab, I'd like to have a portal that lists each (unlimited) Parent/Guardians on the left side, and when clicking on one parent, it pulls the detailed contact info up on the right side of the layout without opening another window. Same in the Students tab, but with student information of course.

Is that possible?

Sure. In fact you have an example of this in SeedCode Calendar. Check out the Docs section of the About tab. There you'll see a portal of documentation entries and when you click on one you see its details on the right hand side.

Take this apart and see how we did it. It is an easy trick that we use a lot.

Thanks for the quick reply! I'll give it a shot!