CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I am trying to figure out the best approach for generating mailing labels for households / married couples.   I am using 2.2.8.  What I would for a household is: "Jim and Mary Smith" to appear as the first line of the label.  If one person has a title, then it should be "Dr. Jim and Mary Smith.   If they do not share a last name then it should be "Jim Smith and Mary Jones"

One idea I had was to use the "hooks" such as hook_civicrm_tokens and  hook_civicrm_tokenValues  to create my own token, but it doesn't seem like the tokens that can be used for CiviMail can be used for mailing labels.     

I also looked at the blog entry at http://civicrm.org/node/558   and thought about moving to version 3.0 using the new "postal greeting" field. But, This would require information about someone's spouse in their contact record and mark half on the contacts "Do not mail" event though there are times when I DO want to communicate with the spouse. Plus someone would have to manually enter the desired postal greeting for half of the contacts of the database. Plus, doesn't this defeat the whole purpose of recording a "spouse" relationship in the database? ANy time someone gets married or divorced, someone would have to update the postal greeting in addition to creating/removing the "spouse" relationship.

Any suggestions are welcome.

I wrote a hook to create a new token called "contact.joint_greeting" as is documented at http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/CiviCRM+hook+specification#CiviCRMhookspecification-Proceduresforimplementinghooks%28forJoomla%29

This is working when I use my new token to generate PDF letters.    I have also changed the "global settings" for address so the mailing label format is specified as:
{contact.joint_greeting}
{contact.addressee}
{contact.street_address}
{contact.supplemental_address_1}
{contact.supplemental_address_2}
{contact.city}{, }{contact.state_province}{ }{contact.postal_code}
{contact.country}

But when I generate my mailing labels, the new token is ignored.

I did some debugging:  My hooks ARE being called. It successfully gets my custom token "contact.joint_greeting"

But in the section of code:
else {
                $found = false;
                
                
                // we should replace all the tokens that are set in mailing label format
                foreach ( $mailingFormatProperties as $key => $dontCare ) {
                    if ( CRM_Utils_Array::value( $key, $contact ) ) {
                        $found = true;
                        break;
                    }
                }

The variable "$mailingFormatProperties" has my token as just "joint_greeting" .  It also seems to be looking for the data to fill the label from the $contact variable, not the array returned from the hook.

I'll put what I have found out so far in the issue tracker.   

i fixed it on your site. there were two issues:

1. your hook implementation was a bit broken

2. the mailing label token substitution behaves a bit differently than the other stuff. This is a bug and needs to be fixed. You can work around it by doing the following in your hook:


function joomla_civicrm_tokens( &$tokens ){
 
  $tokens['contact'] = array( 'contact.joint_greeting', 'joint_greeting' );


}

function joomla_civicrm_tokenValues( &$values, &$contactIDs ) {
    if ( is_array( $contactIDs ) ) {
        $single = false;
        foreach ( $contactIDs as $cid ) {
          $values[$cid]['joint_greeting'] = $values[$cid]['contact.joint_greeting'] = 'George and Jane Jetson';
        }
    } else {
        $values[$contactIDs]['joint_greeting'] = $values[$contactIDs]['contact.joint_greeting']  = 'Single George and Jane Jetson';
        $single = true;
    }
 }


i'm pretty sure this is because of a bad hook implemenation. The code below should be:

function joomla_civicrm_tokenValues( &$values, &$contactIDs ) {
    if ( is_array( $contactIDs ) ) {
        foreach ( $contactIDs as $cid ) {
          $values[$cid]['joint_greeting'] = $values[$cid]['contact.joint_greeting'] = 'George and Jane Jetson';
        }
    } else {
        $values['joint_greeting'] = $values['contact.joint_greeting']  = 'Single George and Jane Jetson';
    }
 }

lobo