When working with Sage CRM's APIs you may experience "strangeness" when interacting with person details.  This is "strangeness" could be when you directly edit phone and email details and every thing seems to save correctly but when the record is examined in CRM then although the phone number and email may be changed in the persons topcontent area they are not actually changed in the details within the phone/email tab.

The strangeness arises from the fact that the email address and phone number in the screens come only from the certain views (vpersonsummary and vpersonpe). In Sage CRM the email and phone fields are denormalised data carried across from the email and phone tables into a table (CRMEmailPhoneData). This denormalization is automatic and occurs when the person phone numbers/emails are inserted or updated. CRM copies the email address of type 'Business' into the person record email address to make merges easier.

Note:  In Sage CRM 2021 R2 we replaced the caption "Fax" with "Alternative" although the caption code remained the same.

Translations control the type of email and phone numbers that are associated with a person. For example the existing phone number types are held in the custom_captions tables as:

Do not remove the "Business" or "Fax" telephone types.

The phone numbers are held in the Phone table. But the company "Business" telephone number is copied to the Company table and the person "Business" number is copied to the Person table. This denormalizing of the data is useful in allowing convenient access to this data in parts of the system.

Email addresses are handled in a similar way.