Contact entity - where are the parent data stored when you set a 'contact' as parent customer?

Question

I would like to link contacts between each others, in a way that a contact will be related to another contact as a Parent/Child relationship (migration process to get a tree view).

I saw into the contact entity metadata a parentcontactid column with a lookup type.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg328530.aspx

Their is no existing lookup field to add to contact forms.

So, I tested through the front-end to set the parentcustomerid to other contacts, you see the modifications on contacts pages, but when navigating into SQL management studio, I don't see entries for the parentcustomerid changed, always related to the Account anyway.

Could someone explain me what is the purpose of the "parentcontactid" if it is not possible to populate it or a way to do it?

Thanks

P.S.: wanted first to use connection entity to link my contacts, but my ETL software seems not have rights to make connections, so, I'm looking for an over way.

Answer 1

You need to use parentcustomerid only. As far as I know parentcontactid was used by previous version of Dynamics CRM and now is deprecated and not available.

parentcustomerid is a special lookup type inside CRM called Customer, the field can accept Account or Contact values, so you need to build your Parent/Child relationship using this field.