Contact changes

DGG proposed this during our meeting and I felt it was too big a change at that time. On some more thinking, it might be something which we should consider.

The proposal is to merge civicrm_individual, civicrm_household and civicrm_organization into civicrm_contact. Here are the relevant fields which will need to be merged into the contact record from these three tables. (note that i have dropped fields that are currently unused)

civicrm_household

civicrm_organization

civicrm_individual

The civicrm_contact table has 20 columns currently. Adding the above gives it a total of 37 columns. From our location experiment we add the primary ids of address / phone / email / IM (4) to make it a total of 41 columns which does not seem crazy. I suspect we might want to keep billing seperate in the individual tables as it does not seem to be used a lot across the board

contact_subtype

A field contact_subtype of contact (which exists in 1.x) will indicate that the contact is an extended contact object.

The additional fields and behaviors will be exposed as a CiviCRM 2.0 Component.

A subtype component exposes itself to CiviCRM as an object implementing the following interface:

– Note: this is a first pass, since the component architecture is still in process –

A instance of a class implementing this interface will be created by a component factory class (TBD by Michał).