Creating a relationship when filling in a Profile

Question

I love the way the "Employee of" relationship can be created simply by adding the "Current Employer" field to a profile. Is there a corollary for other relationships? I need to be able to track if an event registrant is connected to another external partnering organization. However, I don't retain the membership information for the partnering organizations.

Quick example: Create a "Church Member of" relationship to an Organization/Church while signing up for a training.

(If I missed this in the docs, oops!, please forgive me.) It seems that most are using Drupal WebForms, which is, um, difficult? on WordPress.

Answer 1

It's not currently possible to create a relationship on a CiviCRM profile form similar to the Employer one when using WordPress or Joomla.

However, if you create an auto-reference field you can use that to create a link between a participant and another contact.

You can create the field on all contacts, or a contact subtype that covers all those filling in the event registration for trainingeven, or potentially registrants or just the registrants for that event. My guess is that a registrant auto-reference field is less likely to be convenient or what you want.

Don't forget that 1) the auto-reference contacts can be limited to a particular group of contacts, and 2) there are security issues in exposing contact data when using contact reference fields on public forms.

Answer 2

This sounds like it might be a job for CiviRules, which lets you create "if this, then that" type rules with triggers, conditions and actions. It's powerful, but depending on exactly what's required it may need to be extended further. It's also necessary to be careful with configuring it!

(We also have an internal unreleased extension called Keep History that takes custom fields from a contact, and copies them into a relationship. But that was created for a legacy situation where a many-one kind of relationship became many-many so it was necessary to create relationships instead of using contact reference custom fields.)