CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi guys,
Have a really bizarre error that I've spent 2 days trying to debug, but to no avail. Hoping someone here might be able to help.
Running civicrm 3.0.3, drupal 6.14.

The issue is that when any CRM user does a contact search (via basic or advanced search) and then selects some search results and chooses 'Add Contacts to Event', the 'add participant' form returns a fatal error "Could not find valid value for cid" at the bottom of the page, and clicking 'save' gives a 'Sorry. A non-recoverable error has occurred' message. It appears to be that the multiple registration form cannot determine the contact ids being passed to it (or they are not being passed to it).
The URLs have the form: /civicrm/contact/search/advanced?_qf_Advanced_display=true&qfKey=3479b5de017879fb64787f8dcc85cc48
Using the standalone participant registration form ( /civicrm/participant/add&reset=1&action=add&context=standalone) works absolutely fine for registering single participants.

This makes it very difficult for our users who are often having to register multiple participants to events in the system in one go.

This functionality worked fine in the original install of the live system, but has started producing this error in the last month or so. I am tearing my hair out trying to work out what could have caused it.

What I have done to try to fix this:

• Start with a blank new install of v3.0.3 - this works fine, and I was able to add 3 contacts and an event and register them via the search results.
• I then did a db import of the live data (but with no extra modules or template customisations) into this database. The problem reappeared. So somehow, the data in my live system is breaking this feature...
• I thought it can't be the actual data (events/contact records doing this), so it must be some config values stored in the db. I deleted all the backend settings by deleting the config_backend field in the civicrm_domain table. The problem is still there, except instead of getting the "Could not find valid value for cid" fatal error, I now get "Could not find valid Key" on the participants add form.

Anyone have any idea what could be causing this?
I have done some extensive google and forum searches but come up with nothing. Others who have had similar messages have been due to permission errors, or front-end registration forms (this is only back-end users). What I don't understand is how this was working originally but seems to have broken itself.

I have also looked at this suggestion: http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,5701.0.html
and all my database tables are definitely of the correct collation (utf8_general_ci)

I have debugged the CRM\Event\Form\Participant.php to try to trace the source of this error, and having commented out all of the lines in this file and added them back in one by one, the line which the error appears at uncommenting from 0 is line 300:
$this->_action = CRM_Utils_Request::retrieve( 'action', 'String', $this, false, 'add' );This retrieves the action value, which using drupal_set_messages is returned as 1.
In fact using the line
$this->_action = 1;still produces the error. Now I could be way off with this as I don't know the civi codebase well enough, but that seems to be the offender. Presumably somewhere else in the form class is using this value and not being able to complete something, but why would it only occur for my data, and why would I still get the error when everything after this line is commented out ?
It must be being generated outside this file - perhaps in the core form.php or elsewhere in the page sequence.

Any help/suggestions appreciated (although I won't be able to try them until monday).

Cheers

Graham

Thanks for the reply

To answer your questions:

1. does it only happen for that form? or for all form submissions with data

It only happens for that form. Other forms (create/edit contacts, edit events, etc.) all work fine. Other 'search results tasks' (Map Contacts, Tag Contacts, Record Activities) also work fine.

2. make sure your urls are the same, i.e. example.com throughout OR www.example.com not a mixture
if i had to guess, the problem is 2

I'm not quite sure what you mean here but the URLs are all consistent throughout the site. example.com is redirected to www.example.com through a .htaccess rewrite as is common. The search results page is of the form:
http://www.example.com/civicrm/contact/search/advanced?_qf_Advanced_display=true&qfKey=7e56caf841dc5abb194b1764b8b8548e
and when I select contacts and click through to the 'Add Contacts to Event' participants form (the broken one) it's url is still of the form:
http://www.example.com/civicrm/contact/search/advanced?_qf_Participant_display=true&qfKey=7e56caf841dc5abb194b1764b8b8548e

I don't think this is the problem...

Further to my last message, i have managed to reproduce this error on the 3.1 demo site, so I think it is a bug.

Steps to reproduce:
1) On the menu, select Administer->Customize->CiviCRM profile
2) Create a new profile used for search results, named "Search with Full county" and tick it active
3) Create fields for this profile, all for 'Contacts', with visibility: 'Public Pages' and 'Results column' ticked.

• field Street address (labelled 'Address Line 1')
• field City (labelled 'City')
• field State (labelled 'County')
• field Country (labelled 'Country')
• field Email [primary] (labelled 'Email')
• field Phone [primary][phone] (labelled 'Phone')

4) Go to advanced search, tick 'Individuals' and then under the 'Search views' box in the top right, choose 'Search with Full county' and click search
5) Select some contacts from the search results and choose 'Add Contacts to Event' from the search tasks and click the 'Go' button.
6) See the resulting error!

Should I file this as a bug report?

Bug report filed here:
http://issues.civicrm.org/jira/browse/CRM-5792