CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Our client has set up their data with households and individuals that are members of those households. Nice.

They want to do mailings to households (not members of households) in order to avoid duplicate postage to the same physical address. They also want to be able to easily maintain the quality of their mailing list. That means they need to have an alphabetical listing of households that makes sense.

Not:

Andrew Turtle & Melanie Lynche
Dr. & Mrs. Bill Smith
Drs. Jack Jones & Wendy Wallingford
Mr. & Mrs. Gene Abbot
Zelda Bottle & Alice Mains

But:

Abbot, Mr. & Mrs. Gene
Bottle, Zelda & Alice Mains
Jones, Drs. Jack & Wendy Wallingford
Smith, Dr. & Mrs. Bill
Turtle, Andrew & Melanie Lynche

And at the same time, they want the Communication preferences to be:
Dr. & Mrs. Bill Smith
not:
Smith, Dr. & Mrs. Bill.

Is this built in to CiviCRM? Where is it?

---------------------------

The first thought is to change the household name to Smith, Dr. & Mrs. Bill and to put the Dr. & Mrs. Bill Smith into the Nick name. Then change the address to use {contact.nick_name}. Clunky. Lameness. The Nick name should be a Nick name, not the Communication preference name.

Starting to look at the civicrm_contact table it appears that the individual has a Given Name field and a Surname field, and that CiviCRM automagically puts them into a Western European-centric sort_order of Surname, Given Name and display_name of Given Name Surname -- because that is easy to do. [As an aside, I have met Chinese people who want their name written with the Latin alphabet as Surname Given Name; not Surname, Given Name or Given Name Surname. But that is an aside.]

But the household is locked into the display_name = the sort_order, because it is obvious that it requires human intelligence to handle the problem of totally unpredictable naming conventions invented by random CiviCRM users. You can't just put the last name field in front, slam a comma and a space behind it, and drop the first name in behind that.

---------------------------

So why isn't there a field in the UI on the household edit page that allows human intelligence to determine the sort order of households that works well in their own organization? You know, so that the user edits the field and it saves that UI field directly into civicrm_contact.sort_order.

So that:
sort_order = the way the organization wants to sort household names (not the way CiviCRM forces the organization to sort household names)
display_name = the way the organization wants to address the household
nick_name = a nick name

---------------------------

Does anyone else care about this?

It will be crawling across broken glass for me to do this...

Is there someone out there that can do this easily?

jj

We are sponsoring Rohit Thakral of targetintegration.com to put this together.

Please assist Rohit in getting this change into the code base.

Thanks so much for all your great work!

Seems to remember that in Tahoe they worked on that (in chinese the name is last+first without space in between if I recall the story)

Check with the other Erik or Piotr.

X+

All fine, I am glad this is happening...just wanted to share my wishes :-)

can u attach it as a patch file?

lobo

I dont think this patch was submitted

lobo