CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I've been setting up a quite a few CiviCRM installations for nonprofits in Denver, particularly social justice organizing groups and the one area that is consistently limiting seems to be search builder. I've read through all the applicable issues and forum postings I can find (most of which I've run into myself), which I've organized below by subject & links to save some folks in my same situation a little time. I didn't see anything regarding the most recent issue I'm having searching for individuals within specific groups who also meet certain criteria defined by custom fields.

To duplicate (tested on civicrm demo site):
1. create a group and add some people to it (on the demo site I used Summer Program Volunteers which had 9 records, gid=3)
2. create a custom data group and add a custom field of either type Alphanumeric radio or Alphanumeric select. I've only tested with these, but I would guess the other types have the same issue. (on the demo site I used the Most Important Issue field within the Constituent Information group.)
3. In search builder include contacts where: [individual][Most Important Issue][LIKE][%edu%]
4. Include another search field where: [individual][group(s)][IN][3]
5. search

The search returns all contacts who match the custom field, but does not limit it by the group. I can get around it with smart groups, but it is pretty difficult to teach the staff at these groups how to do work-a-rounds. If someone could verify this, or let me know if I'm doing something wrong I'd greatly appreciate it.

The other issues I've been having are all summarized by the threads below:

Can't do IN statements with strings
http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,330.0.html

NOT in, NOT like not functional
http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,1095.0.html

Difficulty searching multiple fields in multiselect custom fields
http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,671.0.html

No support for ‘is null’ and ‘is not null’
http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,297.0.html

From what I've read it sounds like most of these issues have been postponed until release 2.1, so as far as I know the the best solution until then is to work with the search API and/or custom queries. If "NOT in and NOT like" could be removed from the search builder interface in the meantime, I think that might be less confusing for users. If there any plans to address any of the above issues earlier than 2.1 I'd love to know. I also have some free time as a developer and would be happy to try and tackle some of these issues, but it sounds like that might not be a good idea if there is already a plan to refactor search in 2.1.

Any feedback appreciated!

Brian

Thanks Dave, that's really helpful! I'll go take a look at CiviReport and see what I can do.