Organize the workspace’s record classifications
Purpose
The workspace needs consistent categories for people, organizations, addresses, and phone numbers. This capability maintains those classifications and their ordering and applicability, so staff select meaningful choices while existing records retain their interpretation. It also distinguishes safe retirement of a used category from deletion of an unreferenced definition.
How It Works
Authorized users create classifications with nonblank names and stable configuration identities. The service checks grammar, reserved identities, workspace uniqueness, and the identity used by a replacement path. Different catalogue families have different write authority, with address and phone changes requiring administrator permissions.
A reorder supplies every workspace entry once and changes the complete order atomically. Locks protect record content and removal rather than stopping list movement. Address and phone applicability selects people, organizations, or both. A contact keeps a held entry after its type becomes organization-only, but contact-point validation prevents newly choosing that type.
References block deletion of used classifications. Contact creation offers active types and can preselect a sole choice, while existing contacts retain inactive types. Version-tested replacement and patch semantics govern catalogue edits, and presentation assignments have their explicit preservation exception rather than being cleared with unrelated omitted properties.
Example
An association orders its contact types as Member, Prospect, and Former Member. A coordinator sees active choices during creation. Later an administrator deactivates Prospect; people already classified that way retain it. Trying to delete it while those contacts reference it is refused. Reordering the full catalogue changes presentation consistently without treating a locked type as an obstacle to moving other entries.
The administrator makes Prospect inactive while Ruth's saved record still has that classification. Ruth's record remains interpretable, and a later read still identifies Prospect. A new-contact chooser offers active choices instead. If only one is available, the creation flow can preselect it; with no active type it can offer untyped creation. Those chooser conveniences do not make contact type compulsory in the service. A malformed complete-list reorder refuses the operation before moving any entries, so the administrator rereads the catalogue, includes every current choice once, and resubmits the intended order. Deletion remains a separate reference-aware administrator action.
Why It Works This Way
Our reading is that stable identities and reference-aware deletion preserve the meaning of saved records even when terminology changes. Active selection and retained inactive classifications separate future entry policy from past classification. Complete-list reorder prevents partial requests from leaving competing positions or silently losing an entry's place.
Applicability expresses whether a contact-point purpose makes sense on a person or an organization. Retaining an existing entry after a policy change avoids blocking unrelated corrections, while preventing new choices respects the changed catalogue. Separate administrator authority for address and phone types reflects their workspace-wide effects, but that rationale is an interpretation rather than a personal motive. Layout preservation keeps classification maintenance from clearing presentation configured elsewhere.
Relationships
Contact Type and Organization Type classify the parent records. Address and phone types are facets of Contact Details and Communication Preferences and influence value selection there. Resolve the forms and layouts used for CRM records consumes type assignments. Platform security owns permission evaluation, while the configuration function hosts some catalogue routes under Entities' product ownership.