Customers data modeling

Persons

Persons can have configurable attributes and addresses. They can be added to groups and organizations. If they are part of an organization a person may have a role in that organization.

Groups

Permissions are added to groups, and a person gets the permissions of the group(s) they are added to. 

Groups can be simple, smart or contextual. A simple group has a fixed group of persons assigned to it, while a smart group gets its members dynamically through filter conditions. Contextual groups are a bit more complex. The main purpose of contextual groups is to be able to define and control permissions for persons connected to more than one organization. 

Technically, a contextual group does not contain persons, and neither has it any connections to persons, like an ordinary group would have in Litium. Instead, conditions are defined for the contextual groups, and evaluated on request to be able to respond whether a person meet the criteria of the contextual group. The person is then still not added to the contextual group, but the response from Litium can be used to understand which organization the person is currently logged in to, and by doing so only grant the permission level for the current organization.

As an example, let's say a person belongs to two organizations, where he is supposed to have administration permissions for one organization and read permission levels in the second. Without contextual groups, you need to connect the person to two organizations and to two groups, Administrators and Read organization. Using simple groups in Litium, the person would always be granted administrator permissions, since both groups would be evaluated. 

By using contextual groups instead, you can define two contextual groups Administrator and Read organization, and use ready made conditions to define whether a person qualifies for the group.

Organizations

Organizations can have configurable attributes, addresses, and roles. Persons can be added to organizations and can have different roles. 

Fields and field templates

A person, a group, or an organization must have a field template, which is found in back office.

Field templates

Field templates specify what information can be stored in each object.

The field templates for the Customers area can be found in back office, Settings > Customers > Field templates.

There are four types of field templates: person, group, organization, and target group. Each field template type is associated with different information objects and has two static fields, Id and Name. The static fields will always be included in the field template (they are connected to other areas) but can be hidden when the field template is being edited.

Fields

View the fields in back office Settings > Customers > Fields. A field can be included in several field templates.

Persons and organizations have a static field for the customer number. Customer numbers need to be unique, so there can not be a person and an organization with the same customer number.

Adding a custom field to a field template

To add a custom field to the template, it needs to be defined in the Fields list.

1. Go to Settings > Customers > Fields.
2. Create the field you would like to use.
3. Edit the field template by clicking Settings > Customers > Field templates > select the field template > Edit
4. Click the Field tab.
5. Click the pen to edit Fields.
6. Add the field you created by selecting it in the Add field dropdown list.