Customer and CustomerContacts Correspondence (1 Viewer)

[silentwolf]

Hi guys,

just wondering if you guys have a solution to following situation.

I got a CustomersTable and a CustomersContacts Table.
Now I like to record Correspondence for each Contact.

So I need for Customers and for CustomerContacts a Correspondence Table.
Or Add a Private Customer to my CustomerContacts Table in order to be able to record Correspodence.

Which way would you go about it?

Cheers

Albert

 

[The_Doc_Man]

Clarify, please. Are you saying that sometimes you get correspondence from a customer and sometimes from a contact? Or do you have contacts that represent more than one customer? Or were you saying something else? Because at the moment I don't see the issue. In the trivial case, you associate a correspondence to a contact and if you need to know the customer, you follow a back-link from contact to customer. So tell us about these correspondences and why you are having the trouble?

 

[silentwolf]

Hi Doc,

Ok I try to explain it a little better.
I have Customers either they are Companies or Private individual People. All stored in Customers Table.

Customers who are Companies can have "Employees" which I add to CustomerContacts linked to Customers.
i.e. Huber Ltd can have Employees "Mr. Mayer" Mrs. Gruber" who I communicate with .. Correspond with.

And I have Customers as Individuals . Hans Huber for example.
He has no Employees. So I correspond with him directly.

With Companies I can correspond with different people.
With Private Customers only with that person as he has no Employess well unless I would communicate with his wife or her husband.

Hope that makes more sense now?

 

[The_Doc_Man]

And I have Customers as Individuals . Hans Huber for example.
He has no Employees. So I correspond with him directly.

OK, you are doing that wrong. The simplest way to make it work is that Hans Huber is entered as a contact AND as a customer - who represents himself. Then everything is Customer >> Contact >> Communication.

The reason you are doing it wrong is because you created either two classes of customer (OR two classes of contact) and are trying to treat the two classes differently. OR the other way to put that is that you have two things but were having them fit into one class or the other, and that ambiguity of what it is causes you a problem. The issue is non-uniformity of treatment.

To make databases work smoothly you try to unify the way you do things so that you do the same thing each time you do it. It is the different ways of doing things that is causing you grief.

 

[silentwolf]

Well yes that is what I meant, now I have to enter each Private Person as a Contact as well.

So I guess I add a button to the Customer to add the same info to the Contact.

Ok than I do that )

Cheers