Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things.
Donald Knuth
Contact Subsystem
A single contact system is used for all entities that are contactable. Note that since all Users are also Researchers, a Users contact details can be found by looking up the relevant Researcher. If a Researcher is also an Individual in the database, only one contact list is needed.
Contact List
This table is used to collect the various contact values available for a single entity. It is expected that most contact lists will be associated with Individuals although naturally this will be confined to living Individuals. The [ind_id] column is used to point to the Individual concerned.
The Contact List may also be pointed to by a Researcher entry and this is the means of connecting a Researcher's to an Individual in the database.
A Repository record can also point to a ContactList to record its contact details.
Contact
The Contact value [val] is a multi line text string. A future version may use this for an ID number, to point to an Place record.
Contact Type
| ContactType table Core Data | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| [id] | [name] | [uid] | [changed] | |
| 0 | Unstated type | |||
| -1 | Address | 88815CB7641A5C15A6B47B40E69DE654DD52 | 2459664 | |
| -2 | Telephone | 7143E6D4D916C849F2B4FC6554AE5B421483 | 2459664 | |
| -3 | Mobile | D5914CBACD1E86412EB4771C1E015BCBD882 | 2459664 | |
| -4 | 2A56952B37D688AD0F795B059A82619E857A | 2459664 | ||
| -5 | Website | 0913E9393D6F676F74252E9F18516D201CFD | 2459664 | |
| -6 | Fax | D717ACECD3D1DF6E663C9788BFB330350F50 | 2459664 | |
The ContactType table is prefilled with core data as shown on the right. This can be extended by the user (using positive ID numbers) as we find more varied ways of contacting each other.
