Maintain a person’s organizational relationships
Purpose
A coordinator needs to represent a person's several organizational connections without replacing history every time employment or participation changes. This capability stores each dated affiliation on the contact, identifies a primary tie for prominent context, and exposes organization-side views that distinguish people from their individual relationship rows.
How It Works
Staff add an organization and affiliation type with optional dates, title, notes, and roles. The contact owns the write transaction even when staff begin from an organization page. An omitted affiliation collection leaves existing ties intact; an explicit collection describes the intended result, with matching idless rows able to reuse an existing tie.
Date periods include their last day. Same-type ties to the same organization cannot overlap, and an affiliation cannot be reassigned to another organization. A primary tie has started and remains open-ended. Selecting a different primary clears the prior designation in the same save; ending the primary does not select an alternative automatically. The primary title and contact job title follow each other while historical titles remain on ended ties.
The Organization command can select or create a tie using the workspace default. The editor's new-primary workflow asks whether the person left the previous organization; Make Primary on an existing tie has a different interaction. The active-and-upcoming limit does not cap ended history. Organization people views can select current, past, upcoming, all, or an as-of date, paginate affiliation rows, and provide total head count under contact-read authority.
Example
Lena leaves Harbor Engineering and joins Bayview Manufacturing. The coordinator adds Bayview as her new primary affiliation and confirms that she left Harbor. The old tie ends before the new start and retains its historical title and role context. Lena's separate chapter connection remains. Viewing the chapter's Current people includes her, while viewing Harbor's Past relationships explains her earlier employment.
The coordinator dates Lena's new Bayview affiliation October 23. If departure is confirmed, Harbor ends October 22, so the two employer periods do not share an inclusive boundary day. If Lena still consults for Harbor, retaining it keeps it current while Bayview becomes primary. The coordinator reads both relationships afterwards and checks the title now shown on the contact. A chapter connection continues independently in either case. Changing the organization on the old Harbor affiliation is refused; preserving its identity requires ending that relationship and adding the Bayview relationship rather than rewriting what the old row historically represents.
Why It Works This Way
Our reading is that contact ownership makes relationship changes one deliberate aggregate operation rather than conflicting contact-side and organization-side authorities. Omission preservation prevents a client updating a phone from silently erasing employment history. Same-type overlap refusal distinguishes a return from duplicate simultaneous representations; allowing different types preserves genuinely different relationships.
A primary designation is a present label, not the whole membership model. Open-ended primary constraints and explicit selection prevent an ended employer from remaining prominent without inventing a successor. Asking about departure keeps new employment from silently ending a still-valid concurrent tie. Stable organization identity on the affiliation preserves what the historical relationship actually means. Separate affiliation rows and head counts let organization readers see multiple ties without confusing them with multiple people.
Relationships
Contact and Organization supply the two identities, and Affiliation Type supplies the relationship vocabulary. Maintain responsibilities on organizational relationships owns dated role behavior. Shared contact points rely on eligible affiliations, and date reconciliation handles their boundaries. Locate people and organizations uses current ties for discovery; compliance consumes effective responsibilities through committed change reactions.