Add new contact (other than logged in user) using Caldera Forms linked to CiviCRM under Wordpress

Question

Civi 5.10.4. under Wordpress 5.1.1 multisite network using the plugins Caldera Forms and Caldera Forms CiviCRM. I'm seeking to create a new contact creation form for our incarcerated persons visitation & advocacy program. For example, one of our program coordinators gets a call or letter from a detained person that coordinator needs to create a new detained person contact record. The longer term goal is to create a system to track activities like visits, letters, transfers, and complaints. I'm starting by trying to make an interface to create new detained person contacts. I created the detained person contact type, created some of the fields we'll use, and made a profile to contain some of those. Then I created a Caldera Form and mapped the form field names to the detained person contact type.

When I use the form to create a new contact, it updates my own contact record rather than creating a new record. I've tried setting the form processor to link to either Contact 1 or Contact 2, but seem to get the same result. I think there's something I'm not understanding about how to set up the processor.

Can I use Caldera to create a new contact (other than the person logged in)? If so, how? Additionally, it would be ideal to track who was the logged in user who created the new detained person contact. Do I need to create an activity processor for that?

Thanks in advance for any help and guidance the community can provide on this.

Answer 1

After some tinkering, I think I understand better how this works. I included fields for both a volunteer and a new detained person. Before, there were only fields for collecting information on the new detained person.

Now that there are fields for both individuals: 1) the logged in person filling out the form and 2) the new detained individual.

Next I created two processors: CiviCRM Contact 1 and CiviCRM Contact 2.

Contact 1 I associated with the fields for the volunteer and used name & email as the dedupe rule.

Contact 2 I associated with the detained person CiviCRM contact type and associated with the fields for a new detained person.

By using the processors to define the two contact roles it seems to have worked such that the volunteer's account was unchanged and a new detained person record was created. This post helped me understand it better. I'd read it before but after going over it several times figured out what was needed. I hope this helps someone else.