I'm so glad I looked to see what other people were doing with InfoCentral's old code before I started my massive drive to input people into the version I've got running now :-) This team seems to have a lot of good ideas going, and seems to have implemented several *very* useful features, with more in the works.
How do groups work in "multi-church" mode? Can a group have members from various "churches"?
I've recently been made director of a non-profit organization that had been doing all membership tracking through paper files. *ouch*
The organization has various regional councils, with local clubs under the regional council's direction. If multi-church mode allows for groups to be populated cross-church, that would allow me to make each council a church, and each local club a group within that church, while still having a group that captures all the leaders of individual local groups...
...needless to say, having both the councils and the local clubs as groups within my test set-up of InfoCentral is cumbersome at best....
Of course, if anyone has any better ideas on how to structure this, I'd appreciate those too!
Thanks!
Janet Callahan
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The current multi-church feature is to allow multiple churches to exist in the same database and be hosted from the same server. There is currently no cross-functionality between church sites.
I think you could set up a single church as your organization and create groups for each council and club.
Let me know if that solves your problem.
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
To better describe the functionality that Janet is wanting,
what would actually be ideal for our needs is to be able to set up some sort of "parental" relationship between groups.
I.E.: Clubs "A" and "B" are children of Council "X". Calling a listing of the members of "X" would not only give you the people directly associated with "X", but those in "A" and "B" as well.
One possible implementation would be to add a "Parent_Group" column to the group table, which defaults to an invalid id (like -1) to indicate that the group has no parent... This design has the limitation that a subgroup can only have one parent... I.E.: clubs A and B can't get together and decide to form a joint Youth Group.
Or you could create a separate table with all of the parent/child relationships. This would allow a group to have more than one parent, but would introduce the possibility that a group is an ancestor of itself.
Of course, either way you go about doing it introduces some noxiousness.
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Thanks for the further detail. Could you give us some examples of how you would use this, say types of reports, alter notifications, group email capabilities....
Thanks,
Steve
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The biggest thing that I'm looking for is the ability to pull any given report or mailing list by council - so, by "parent" group, with the individual "child" groups listed out in the report.
For example, if I pull a membership report for the Michigan region, I'd like to get the info for each of the individual groups in the region, plus a total.
Right now, with the way I've got things set up, I have both the individual groups and the regions all set up as groups...so I have to make sure that each family gets put into both their local group and their regional group - and there's no way to look at the regional group and know who belongs with which local group.
Thanks.
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
I'm so glad I looked to see what other people were doing with InfoCentral's old code before I started my massive drive to input people into the version I've got running now :-) This team seems to have a lot of good ideas going, and seems to have implemented several *very* useful features, with more in the works.
How do groups work in "multi-church" mode? Can a group have members from various "churches"?
I've recently been made director of a non-profit organization that had been doing all membership tracking through paper files. *ouch*
The organization has various regional councils, with local clubs under the regional council's direction. If multi-church mode allows for groups to be populated cross-church, that would allow me to make each council a church, and each local club a group within that church, while still having a group that captures all the leaders of individual local groups...
...needless to say, having both the councils and the local clubs as groups within my test set-up of InfoCentral is cumbersome at best....
Of course, if anyone has any better ideas on how to structure this, I'd appreciate those too!
Thanks!
Janet Callahan
Janet,
The current multi-church feature is to allow multiple churches to exist in the same database and be hosted from the same server. There is currently no cross-functionality between church sites.
I think you could set up a single church as your organization and create groups for each council and club.
Let me know if that solves your problem.
To better describe the functionality that Janet is wanting,
what would actually be ideal for our needs is to be able to set up some sort of "parental" relationship between groups.
I.E.: Clubs "A" and "B" are children of Council "X". Calling a listing of the members of "X" would not only give you the people directly associated with "X", but those in "A" and "B" as well.
One possible implementation would be to add a "Parent_Group" column to the group table, which defaults to an invalid id (like -1) to indicate that the group has no parent... This design has the limitation that a subgroup can only have one parent... I.E.: clubs A and B can't get together and decide to form a joint Youth Group.
Or you could create a separate table with all of the parent/child relationships. This would allow a group to have more than one parent, but would introduce the possibility that a group is an ancestor of itself.
Of course, either way you go about doing it introduces some noxiousness.
Thanks for the further detail. Could you give us some examples of how you would use this, say types of reports, alter notifications, group email capabilities....
Thanks,
Steve
The biggest thing that I'm looking for is the ability to pull any given report or mailing list by council - so, by "parent" group, with the individual "child" groups listed out in the report.
For example, if I pull a membership report for the Michigan region, I'd like to get the info for each of the individual groups in the region, plus a total.
Right now, with the way I've got things set up, I have both the individual groups and the regions all set up as groups...so I have to make sure that each family gets put into both their local group and their regional group - and there's no way to look at the regional group and know who belongs with which local group.
Thanks.