How to Select Multiple Contact Types for a Single Contact

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How can we make a single person (Contact) be categorized as belonging to multiple Contact Types. For example, John Doe might be a Vendor, a Client, Family, and an Accountant. In other words, John Doe has different Roles. We do not want to enter the same person as four different Contacts. Our database has 20 different Contact Types. What am I missing conceptually? Thank you.

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Don foufione 270 on at

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Hello GHowe,

The multiple choice field is not managed by CRM in the way you asked, but there are some turnovers. the following links may help you :

- community.dynamics.com/.../139896

-community.dynamics.com/.../215995

Br,

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Aric Levin - MVP 30,190 Moderator on at

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In the next version of CRM, once available for On-Premise, you can help a multiselect optionset.

You would then be able to have multiple contact types.

In the interim, you can create an entity called contact type and have a N:N relationship between contact and contact type and display in a subgrid.

Sonoma Partner had a multi-select for Dynamics CRM/365, but not sure if that is still available, as the have been merged with another company. Might be other products out there.

Hope this helps.

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Community Member on at

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Hi,

A field with an option set, you can only select one option. if you wanted to able to select multiple options, you will have to create something in javascript which displays all the roles and you can pick many.

It will be displayed like a subgrid.

thanks

Sachin

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David Jennaway 14,065 on at

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There are four main ways to do this are:

Use a multi-select option set. However, this was only available from CRM v9

You could have a separate yes/no field for each contact type. This would just about work with 20 contact types, but it's a bit clumsy

Use connections and roles. However, connections are typically to another record

Create a ContactType entity, with a many-many relationship to contact. From a data structure perspective this can work well, but it's not the most efficient for data entry

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Community Member on at

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Thank you. It seems the Short Answer is No, but there is the above workaround.

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