Contacts vs. Users in a Knack Database App

Contacts vs. Users: What I really mean by this is "people" ... folks with a name, email address, etc. This first question you should ask when setting up your data is if this person will ever, at any point in the future, need to log into the Knack app. If the answer is yes they might, then you should from the get-go set them up as a User. You don't have to give them a password initially, or you may never. But let me tell you, in a Knack database app, it is a colossal pain to transition a non-user data table into an actual User table. So, check out this short video for some further details.

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Full Transcript

okay Dave Parish back with another video hopefully sound quality is better on this one I apologize about that last one I'm in a quieter place but there's some dogs and there's some birds so let's go for it today's topic contacts versus users uh you should handle these differently there's a couple different scenarios in contact versus user what I'm really talking about is when you have a person in your app if an individual they got a name they got an email address uh you need to consider a few things and how they're going to be handled up in your data structure and it's really important this won't be a long one but I'm gonna throw a knowledge bomb on you if you will that you need to follow and I'll be right back with that okay here's a Lowdown in contacts versus users or more broadly when you have an individual person in your app how you should handle them give you a couple examples here's uh this is one of Knack demo deals but companies in each company could have a contact that's well and good here's companies here's contacts one company can have many contacts so you could do if you add go to a company and then see all the contacts that can be very useful here's my little knowledge bomb if you ever this is important think that one of these contacts could end up being someone who logs in do not put them up here create them as a user and you're going to add them as a calm contacts you can add them as aa record in here you're not going to create credentials for them but when the time comes if they're going to be a user to log in and see stuff you can deal with how the connections work later meaning this user is connected to this company or whatever put them down here first and I'm going to give you an example of that here's another one this is what I'm doing right now it's a swimming school and this app manages different classes they offer instructor scheduling of the classes students and the students specifically an instance of that student taking a class because they can take more than one class over time when we started this off he said no no we're the parents aren't going to log in maybe down the road they will but we're not going to have them well as soon as I said that I put parents down here and we'll see some records you'll see they don't have passwords because right now they're not logging in but eventually I know they're going to want this hey let's let the parents login and they can see what activities the students their kids are doing uh we score them we have all kinds of information and eventually we're going to build this out where the parents can actually select the class and pay for the class right through all the next thing right now we're handing off the data from another ad to this that they've already been using so here's my overall point the only reason that I'm doing this video today if you ever think that a person would log in and doesn't have to be maybe you're going to select certain contacts at a company we'll log in but if any of that group will eventually have login credentials login see stuff related to them make them as a user from the get-go you don't need to give them credentials you can deal with all that later that's my point that's all I got today thank you take care.