One or several pages for all "contacts" (i. e. persons, companies, other entities)

Hello there,
I am using Coda to build a dashboard for a law firm. Currently, one of the pages contains a table with all Contacts. Contacts include human individuals and non-human legal entities (such as companies, corporations, authorities, courts). Now, individuals and entities are “same-same but different” animals. They are “same same” as they both may or may not (1) have the property Client and ClientNumber or, alternatively, Opponent and (2) have relations to entries in certain other pages such as court CourtProceedings (they are involved in), Mandates (they have given the law firm), Documents (that relate to them), Matters (that relate to them), Invoices (that are issued to them) etc.
But individuals and entities are also “different” as individuals may have the properties Current place of living, Birthdate etc. and potentially lots more, whereas companies may have properties such as Legal Representative (another entry from Contacts), Place of business and potentially lots more.
Plus, the lawyer dashboard shall also contain views that show entries from Contacts if certain requirements are met, such as “Client: true” or “IsNotBlank(ClientNumber)”.
What do you recommend? Should both individuals and entities remain in the same large page/database Contacts or should I split between Individuals and LegalEntities (and maybe even further into CompaniesAndCorporations and CourtsAndAuthorities? If the latter, is it possible to produce views including both databases?
Is it at all possible to split up, given that I currently use entries and properties of entries from Contacts by reference in other pages/databases and these entries may both be individuals and entities?
Would be interested in your views.
Best regards,
Jamo

Hi,

According to your profile you’re very new to Coda. I would strongly recommend that you spend some time familiarising yourself with Coda before committing on a big project like this.

Table design is quite subjective. Personally i prefer having as few tables as possible. So in your scenario I typically have a “business partner”, and then split it into views for natural and legal persons. And maybe customers vs suppliers, etc.

Underpinning that though, is the practical consideration of the number of rows - once you get into performance problems you will then need to split your table. Apparently around 10,000 lines, I have not yet built something with that many rows.

Regards
Rambling Pete

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