CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Is there any documentation on how to customize the greeting when you are entering a new contact?

The "Greeting" functionality is pretty "under-developed" so far. How are you planning on using it? What customization(s) do you need?

I think I may need to use a customized greeting. I can't find any other threads or documentation where this has been discussed, so I'm not even sure if I need a customized greeting or whether there is another way to attack the problem I'm facing. But it seems like the most appropriate place to post rather than starting a new thread.

Situation:
I have a spreadsheet of individual contacts from a client. The spreadsheet has fields for First Name, Last Name and Partner. In some cases, the partner has a different last name to the primary contact, and the partner last name is shoehorned into the Partner field as well. At present, the Partner field is completed with values such as "& Mary" so that a mail merge using First Name, Partner, Last Name would be addressed "Dear John & Mary Smith".

Challenge:
I need to clean this spreadsheet up for import into CiviCRM. The challenge I have is how to deal with the Partner field. The ideal solution would ensure that communications from CiviCRM are addressed in the same manner as they are now.

Proposed Solution:
My proposed solution is below.

Add custom fields for Partner First Name and Partner Last Name to the Individual contact form. Create a customized greeting that combines these with the First Name and Last Name fields to create an acceptable greeting as in the following examples:

Example 1:
First Name = Bob
Last Name = Jones
Partner First Name = Mary
Partner Last Name = Smith
Customized Greeting = Dear Bob Jones and Mary Smith

Example 2
FN = Mike
LN = Wilson
PFN = Jeane
PLN = blank
Customized Greeting = Dear Mike and Jeane Wilson

Questions:
- Does this make sense?
- Is there a better solution than this? I've explored linking individuals and partners to Households but I'm not convinced it's the way to go.
- Can I use Customized Greetings in the way I've described?
- If so, how? Is coding required?

Any thoughts, feedback or pointers would be welcomed.

Thanks

David

There is some functionality in Mailing Labels configuration that can get your "part way there". You can reference custom fields within the "Individual Name Format" under Global Settings >> Address Settings.

I did an experiment to cover your 2nd example. Added a custom field for Partner First Name (custom field id = 4) and then modified the Individual Name Format to be:

{contact.individual_prefix}{ } {contact.first_name}{ and }{contact.custom_4}{ }{contact.last_name}{ }{contact.individual_suffix}

This works great as long as all the contact you're doing the Label run for have the same setup (partner first only). You could cover your 1st example by adding partner first and last in that format - but having to change the setting for each run isn't really practical. Bottom line is this may be more of a thought starter unless you can get the data to follow a consistent pattern. AND possibly take advantage of the fact that mailing label lines whose tokens evaluate to empty strings are skipped (so if the partner name was formatted on a 2nd line, the tokens and the line would be ignored for contacts w/o partner values.

Thanks. I should be able to use these thoughts to get something working.

In the meantime, I took the social engineering route - convince the client to do it the least complicated way! However, we'll still have the challenge with physical mailing labels and I hadn't explored that functionality yet, so your input above will prove very useful there.