A commercial party role — marks an existing CRM company or contact as a supplier, customer, partner, or manufacturer (Odoo's supplier_rank/customer_rank, SAP's Business-Partner roles, expressed as rows). One party can hold several roles at once (a company that's both supplier and customer has two rows).

manufacturer is the odd one out: in the catalogue a "manufacturer" is usually a brand — a product-master attribute — and the brand owner, the legal manufacturer and the supplier you actually buy from are frequently three different companies. The role is therefore granted on two paths only: the catalogue's link action (a human naming the real party) and the opt-in mix phoenix_kit_crm.import_manufacturers_from_catalogue backfill, which an operator runs deliberately and which is dry-run by default — never implicitly, and never from a form. Holding both supplier and manufacturer on one party is the case this shared table exists for.

roleable_type + roleable_uuid point at phoenix_kit_crm_companies or phoenix_kit_crm_contacts — a soft ref, no FK (a single FK can't express the polymorphic target; integrity lives here in the changeset, mirroring the staff_person_uuid precedent on InteractionParty).

metadata is never cast from raw UI params — the Roles checkboxes in the company/contact forms only ever toggle role membership via PhoenixKitCRM.PartyRoles.grant_role/3 and revoke_role/2, which don't accept caller-supplied metadata either. Role-scoped commercial attributes land here only through a future dedicated context function.