Inline editing of custom organisation field like employer field

[VitorFF]

Hello,

We are trying to replicate the way the API converts the current_employer contact data field into the employer_id using in-line editing in order to do it in some similar custom data for our brand new dashboard's view & edit contact page.

Right now we have this field working (thanks Coleman!) where we're using in-line editing to set the current employer of a contact:

Code: [Select]

<span id="contact-{$cid}" data-action="create" class="crmf-current_employer crm-editable">{$summary.current_employer}</span>

But in our 'Undergraduate institution'  custom field (custom_49) we are not being able to replicate this functionality:

Code: [Select]

<span id="contact-{$cid}" data-action="create" class="crmf-custom_49 crm-editable custom_49" ></span>     

We have tried to pinpoint where in the API call this conversion is being made to see why our solution is not working and/or if we can replicate it.
We looked it up in these files for the place the conversion is made in order to study it:
#  "all/modules/civicrm/api/v3/Contact.php" civicrm_api3_contact_create();
#  "all/modules/civicrm/api.php"  civicrm_api();
#  "all/modules/civicrm/api/v3/utils.php" civicrm_api3_validate_fields();

But so far we had no luck.

All help and suggestions are much appreciated!

Thanks.

[Coleman Watts]

When I just type an api call for this type of thing into my console it works fine, e.g.:
CRM.api('contact', 'create', {id: 214, custom_1: 'Env'});

Take a look in your console to see what ajax call is being fired by the inline-edit, and compare it to the one that gets fired when you just type in a call like the one above.

[VitorFF]

Hi Coleman,

Again, thank you a lot for your help so far!

So, this is the data that is being passed on the AJAX call

Code: [Select]

entity:contact
action:create
json:{"id":"32972","custom_49":"Institution Name"}

And the response is this

Code: [Select]

action: "create"
entity: "contact"
error_code: 2001
error_field: "custom_49"
error_message: "custom_49 is not a valid integer"
is_error: 1
type: "integer"

Somewhere it should probably be converting the name into a CiviCRM contact id but it is not.

The one that works, current_employer, finds and saves the employer_id on the contact's data, but we can't find how to replicate these with our education institution field. We've checked and data-action='create' is present.

Thank you one again for all your help!

[Coleman Watts]

Ahhhhhhh.
Riiiiiiiight.
Noooooo.

I didn't realize that your custom field was of type "Contact Reference". Yea, you can't do that. A contact reference custom field expects a contact id, not a display name.
You would need to add some extra code that looked up the contact by name and inserted an id.

[totten]

You would need to add some extra code that looked up the contact by name and inserted an id.

I feel like somebody wrote a helper for that recently...

[Coleman Watts]

Haha yep that was me. It's called entityRef and it works magic... but it's 4.5 only. Sorry guys.

[VitorFF]

Thanks for responding Coleman.

We basically want to have a field which behaves like the employer field, so it creates and attaches a contact if there isn't one already, otherwise it just makes it reference the existing one. Do you know where this is done?

Thank!

[Coleman Watts]

It's not done. That's the point, the api doesn't currently support this.