I would like to create a Drupal View showing an organization and several individuals who are related to the organization in different relationships. The wording on the CiviCRM Drupal relationships options is ambiguous, and I am struggling to find clear documentation describing CiviCRM relationships in Drupal Views.
How do I create a View showing several related entities linked to a common entity by distinct relationship types?
You can use the relationship section of a view for this. A relationship in a view is a relationship between entities don't confuse it with the relationship you have between contacts.
So you could set up a view relationship starting from contact a (the a side of the civicrm relationship), or from contact b (the b side of the civicrm relationship). This a link to the civicrm relationship entity. When you add this relationship to the view you can define which civicrm relationship type.
The next step is to make a view relationship between the civicrm relationship entity and the contact. This relationship is called CiviCRM Contact, the Contact B, or CiviCRM Contact the Contact A.
Then in the fields section of the view you can add fields based on the entity. You can then say for example I want to use display name of Contact B.
If you are familiar with SQL. A view relationship could be described as a join.
I am not sure from the question whether each relationships is connected to the original contact, or if some might be daisy chained eg Parent to Student to School etc. In case it is the latter, here is a snip from an old forum post which might help
CONNECT A to B
Add DV relationship 1 of type "Connects a contact (as contact A) to a relationship." (eg employer of)
Add DV relationship 2 of type "The contact B" use DV 1 as the 'Relationship'
So you have now connected person X to Org Y
CONNECT B to C
Add DV relationship 3 of type "Connects a contact (as contact A) to a relationship." (eg Primary Contact of) - use DV 2 as the 'Relationship'
Add DV relationship 4 of type "The contact B" use DV 3 as the 'Relationship'
OUTCOME
So now you should have connected person X to Org Y and then Org Y to person Z.
etc
ANOTHER EXAMPLE might be if you want to show grandchildren where you have multiple parent-child relationships including some 2 level situations.
so Person A is Parent of Person B, and Person B is Parent of Person C
Hence Person A is 'grandparent' of Person C
This is an update to the answer given by petednz - fuzion. In my case I needed to create a view which showed a list of all employees of the organisation employing the currently logged in employee. In other words if a contact is logged into the website (Drupal), they can see the details for their organisation and all the employees of their organisation.
I followed the steps given in the answer by petednz, but this didn't work for me. I needed to adjust his section when connecting B to C to get it to work. The steps I followed were:
To show fields relating to the currently logged in user use the relationship defined in step 2.
To show fields relating to the organisation, use the relationship defined in step 5.
To show fields relating to the employees of the organisation, use the relationship defined in step 7.
The difference between my answer and petednz's answer is that when he is connecting B to C, he creates the CiviCRM Relationship (starting from Contact A), and I use the CiviCRM Relationship (starting from Contact B), and then he creates the CiviCRM Relationships: Contact ID B, and I create the CiviCRM Relationships: Contact ID A.
I have created an export of my view which demonstrates the answer.
It should then be possible to create one part of the view to show the organisation details and then an attachment view to show the employees to tidy things up.
