I have a few questions about our data structure and best practice.
We log charities into our database and their charity number is often used as a unique reference. However, some charities have many branches and they also get logged into CRM as separate accounts. I think that the head office should be added to CRM with the charity number and if the child office is a branch (account type) then no charity number is required. This leads me to think about the possible development opportunities.
1) I could create a new entity so I have an entity for parent organisations (accounts) and another for branches. This would avoid organisations being linked to other organisations. This however seems like overkill.
2) I could create a business rule that if an account type of organisation is "branch" then the charity number information is hidden so it cannot be populated.
3) I could create a quick view form so information about the head office can be displayed within the branch office record.
Does anyone have any useful tips for this kind of database structure where records need to be linked to themselves? Is this good practice? Obviously in the SQL you have everything in the same table.
I have to do the same for our event entity. We often have events that have sub-events within them that we call sessions. This means if you counted all our events on CRM, you would need to remove any where the event is actually a session event. If you could all event bookings then you might see double bookings as someone is linked to an event and then 3 other events that are actually part of the parent event.
I could again amend the form so if the event type is session then different fields are displayed or I could just go the whole way and create a session entity. This latter option seems more sensible. That way I can also control the entity relationships. I would not want orders raised on session events, just the parent event. With a new entity type of session, I could control this.
Any information about how people manage entities that need to be related to themselves would be useful. Probably lots of ways to do things.