Method Community

Please bear with me, I am coming to this project midway through finishing someone elses work. Currently my customer record has fields for the customer's first name, last name, email, phone number, and alt phone number. I use the phone number for home phone number, and alt phone number for mobile phone number. When I save the customer record, these fields auto create the first contact in the customer's contacts record. If I edit these fields again from the customer record, the fields in the contact record update. If I edit these fields from the customer's contacts record, those fields update and save in the customer record.

If I create another contact, the customer record fields do not apply over to these extra contacts.

What I'm trying to do is add two extra fields in the customer record, a field for a fax number, and a field for a work number. These fields need to be fields also in the contact record. Then, when I put data into the customer record, and hit save, when it creates the first instance of a contact, it saves the fax number and the work phone number to only the first contact.

I've tried doing this with linked fields, but i've encounted a couple of problems:

• When editing the linked field from the contact record, and I click save, the data saves for the phone and altphone fields, but not for the linked fax and linked work phone fields.
• if I put in these fax and work phone values from the customer record, it will indeed fill them in the first contact record, but also any subsequent contact record.

I just don't understand how this was able to be programmed before, or haven't figured it out yet. I've looked through all the actions and can't find anything meaningful for this particular scenario.

So to wrap it up, what I'm trying to do is create a 1-1 relationship between the name and phone number fields from an individual customer record, with the first contact record, in that customer record. It's already happening with first name, last name, phone number, and altphone. I just need to do this with two more fields. I only want these updates to affect the first contact record, and not any subsequent contacts.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Hi Trish,

The linking of the fields between the Customer and the Primary Contact is done on the backend to conform with QuickBooks rules. You can replicate this behaviour in Method at the screen level for custom fields, but it requires more work.

You would need to add this logic to the save button on the New Customer, Edit Customer and Add / Edit Contact screens. When saving the customer, you’ll need to use an Update Field In Table action in order to update the same fields for the primary contact. When saving the primary contact, you’ll need to use an Update Field In Table action to update the same fields for the customer.

You can use the SpecialType field on the Contacts table to determine if the contact is the primary. Contacts are linked to the customer via the Entity field which links to the FullName field on the Customer table.

I hope this helps, but let me know if you still have any questions.

--Audisho

Thank you for the reply Audisho. How would I determine if the contact is primary?

Hi Trish,

The primary contact will have a value of “Contact” in the SpecialType field. Secondary contacts will have a value of “AltContact” and Method-only contacts will have a blank value. I hope this helps.

--Audisho

Hello Audisho,

This is working, kind of. I am able to push the data from a custom field "altphone2" from my customer record to the custom field "altphone2" in my primary contact record. The problem is this is applying to every primary contact of every customer. What parameters must I set to apply this change only to the customer I am working with?

Hi Trish,

You need to match the correct contact using the Entity field on the Contacts table. This is a dropdown of the FullName field from the Customer table.

I did mention this in one of my previous replies. Please be sure to read my instructions carefully, as mistakes in customization can easily lead to data corruption.

--Audisho