civicrm_api3('participant', 'create', $p): registered_by_id is not valid : 78420

[Erich Schulz]

hey all, dumb question (in which I specialise)

I assumed registered_by_id was a contact ID

is it something else?

and where would I find the doco for it?

many thanks! you all rock!

[Erik Hommel]

registered_by_id refers to the participant_id, and the particpant then has the contact_id. So if I as participant 23 also register another participant 24, the registered_by_id of participant 24 will contain 23

[Erich Schulz]

Hey thanks Erik

Mmm so if you are not a participant you can't record that you registered someone? Ok.

[Erik Hommel]

It seems to suggest that yes....but I could imagine a use case for a secretary registering while she is not a participant. There might be a need for some feature adding here?

[Coleman Watts]

Agree this is a missing feature. With webforms you can have anyone register anyone else, but the registered_by_id is fairly useless in that case. Webform gets around this by simply not populating it (so the data on who registered whom just doesn't get stored). In other cases I've seen a custom field used for this purpose.

[Erik Hommel]

Yes, I have seen that too. And there seems to be a growing group of organizations that might want to sponsor an extension for 'Secretary Registration'. Is that something you would consider?

[Coleman Watts]

Sure. Maybe the project would be as "simple" as modifying the schema so that registered_by_id was changed to the contact_id instead of the participant_id of the registering person.
Or maybe keep it and add a new field.

[Erik Hommel]

Hi Coleman,
not surprised 
The question was mean for Erich Schulz, I should have been more specific 

[Erich Schulz]

Heh, nice asking Erik!

sadly my organisation is very poor :-(

and also this is not critical - I notice there is a "source" field that enable some text value, so it is probably adequate.

I'm happy to update the doco somewhere if I got a pointer to where the data dictionary lives!

[Erik Hommel]

No worries Erich, it was worth a try 

I would not use the source field, but create a custom field? The source field is used for other purposes (the source of a contact, for example specific webform) and in general it is better practise not to use core fields for other functional purposes.

Keep checking the available extensions, something for secretary is likely to pop up in the near future me thinks...