Affiliations go many-per-person

Why Care?

A person is not affiliated with an organization. They're affiliated with several, in different shapes, over time: the company that signs their paycheck, the two boards they sit on, the startup they advise, the place they used to be CFO. Yesterday's [[2026-06-16_01_Person-Enrichment-Surface-Ships-Pulse-Pattern-And-Auto-Detected-Orgs|person-enrichment surface]] modeled exactly one of those and called it "the org." Every operator filling out an attendee had to pick which affiliation mattered and drop the rest on the floor.

Tonight that single slot becomes a stack. The operator can add as many affiliations as the person actually has, give each one a role in plain words ("board", "advisor", "past CFO", "primary"), and that exact word lands on the affiliations graph edge so the relationship carries its own meaning. The org behind each card finds-or-creates the same way it always did — but now it also autocompletes from canonical as you type, so the fourth attendee from the same firm reuses the org row you already enriched instead of spawning a near-duplicate.

This is the difference between a contact database that says "works somewhere" and one that can answer "who in this room sits on a Stand Together board and used to run a fintech." We're building the second one.

What's New?

• Many affiliations per person. The old single-org section (OrgCreate) is retired in favor of an open-ended list of AffiliationCard components. + add affiliation appends a card; each renders collapsed as a role · conventional_name pill and expands to a full edit card on click.

• Free-text role on the graph edge. Each card's role string is written directly to affiliations.kind on the RELATE, replacing the hardcoded "operator-confirmed". Empty role falls back to "other". No dropdown — same flexibility ethos as link kind.

• Org autocomplete + pick-existing. Typing ≥2 chars into the complete-name field fires a debounced, sequence-guarded lookup (lookupOrgs) that matches complete_name / conventional_name / slug case-insensitively and returns up to 8 hits. Clicking one (pickOrg) fully hydrates the card and flips it to a RELATE-only save — no new org row.

• Orgs own many email domains. New OrgDomain type and DomainList sub-dimension: an org carries an array of { domain, kind } rows. IHS gets both theihs.org and ihs.gmu.edu. Domain-based auto-detect now checks domains.*.domain first, then falls back to the old org_links / org_corpus domain scan.

• Lazy per-org hydration. Loading a person's existing affiliations does a lean fetch — just role + org id + names, enough for the pill. The heavy fields (org_links, org_corpus, domains) hydrate on first expand via hydrateOrgDetail(i), idempotently. A person with a dozen affiliations still loads fast.

• Defensive SurrealDB auth retry. The WebSocket can drop on idle and auto-reconnect without re-signing in, so the next query comes back Anonymous access not allowed. getDb() now wraps .query to catch that one failure mode and retry once after a fresh signin/use. Real credential errors still bubble up.

• Slugifier no longer mints "The…" duplicates. slugify() now strips a leading the so "The Institute for Humane Studies" and "Institute for Humane Studies" collapse to one slug — and one org row.

• Three new scripts turning the canonical layer into deliverables and cleaning up after the slug bug (below).

How it Works

The affiliation card, top to bottom

The state for one card lives in a single AffiliationState object (lib/types.ts) — the per-card identity (uiId for the #each key), UI state (expanded), the role string, the org id + name fields, the three org sub-arrays, and the two booleans that used to be component-level globals: affiliationCreated (guards against duplicate edges) and autoDetectedFrom.

That last move is the structural heart of the change. Yesterday those were three top-level $state values — fine when there was one org. To go many-per-person they had to move inside each card's state, and every saver in App.svelte grew an i parameter naming which affiliation it's committing:

ensureOrgExists(i)      appendOrgLink(i, link)
appendOrgCorpus(i, …)   appendOrgDomain(i, domain)

flowchart TD
  load[Load person] --> q{Existing<br/>affiliations?}
  q -->|yes| lean[Lean fetch: role + id + names<br/>→ one collapsed pill each]
  q -->|no| dom{Email domain<br/>matches an org?}
  dom -->|yes| pill[One auto-detected pill<br/>role defaults to 'primary']
  dom -->|no| empty[Empty — operator clicks<br/>+ add affiliation]
  lean --> expand[Click pill → hydrateOrgDetail i<br/>pulls links/corpus/domains lazily]
  pill --> expand
  expand --> save[Enter on any field →<br/>ensureOrgExists i → RELATE w/ role]

Autocomplete that doesn't race

The lookup is debounced and sequence-guarded. Each keystroke schedules a timer and bumps a monotone lookupSeq; when a response lands, it's dropped unless its seq is still the latest. So a slow query for "Inst" can't clobber the fresh results for "Institute" — the classic autocomplete race, closed.

Auth retry, precisely scoped

The retry only fires on NotAllowedError / Anonymous access not allowed. Anything else — wrong password, malformed query — throws straight through. After one fresh signin + use, it retries the original query exactly once; a second failure propagates. Narrow on purpose: we want to paper over the reconnect gap, not mask real auth problems.

The scripts

Also captured: a pattern, not yet built

context-v/explorations/Forced-One-By-One-Tag-Selector.md names a reusable pulse-dimension that surfaced at the end of the session: a tag selector that forces one (tag, entity) decision at a time instead of a bulk checkbox column, because bulk-tick produces lazy, half-considered tags. First concrete instance is a "high-value under-the-radar lead" flag on the worklist; abstracted to instantiate with any tag set + entity ref + onApply callback. Drafted, not implemented — flagged as the next pulse-dimension to build.

What's Next

• Build the forced one-by-one tag selector from the exploration.

• The slug fix prevents new "The…" duplicates; run surreal-merge-ihs-duplicate.mjs against any that already exist beyond IHS.

• Affiliation edges now carry meaningful roles — the query lenses that exploit them ("who advises and used to be a founder") are the payoff still to wire up.