not understanding profiles.. can anyone help

[falinx]

Hi all, new to civicrm but I'm trying to find a way to create forms on the frontend of joomla to draw data from civicrm. However any profile I am creating then linking the html snippet for is not bringing back any data.. it just literally states the field I am trying to draw from. I know I'm missing something simple and as I said I'm new, so what is the next step after creating the profile to actually get the db data back?

[Hershel]

What precisely do you want to see? The data for one person or for everyone?

I would suggest you review this https://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/Linking+Profiles as it may have the answer.

[falinx]

Yeah data for everyone as a start and I can't even get that right for some reason. Tnx for the reading material there, will go through it and see what I can see.

[petednz]

However any profile I am creating then linking the html snippet for is not bringing back any data.. it just literally states the field I am trying to draw from.

You say 'html snippet' - can you clarify - are you talking about the Profile itself, or are you pasting the 'html snippet' in to some other object?

I think the 'html snippet' can only be used for data collection - if this is what you are doing is there  a reason you are not using the profile itself?

[falinx]

ah okay, well it is a joomla front end. So I am creating the custom profile, then taking the html snippet and adding it directly to an article with a header. It looks like what was going wrong is basically the civicrm permissions after much messing around. So when logged in as administrator the fields are coming up correctly. So this begs the question, if you want a customised search to bring up specific data how does one do that? I tried the civicrm customised search option and then I can only link it to a "1" or "2" which have specific data on addresses and contribution amounts. That not very customisable . Is there a trick to doing that?

[petednz]

sorry i can't really help decipher what is required in the case of joomla

[stevegjacobs]

Usually the way to add a Civicrm profile to the Joomla front end is to add it as a menu item. When you add a new menu item, you need to click on the 'menu item tye' select button and then select civicrm, which will open a list of profile types.

[falinx]

Thanks guys, after much reading I now understand the concept and it's all going smoothly with this particular issue