CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I found some good instructions about putting the Current Employer field to autocomplete in a profile.  However it specifically warns against this unless the person is logged in with access to CiviCRM.

http://en.flossmanuals.net/CiviCRM/DevelopAPI
{if $session->get('userID') > 0}

<script type="text/javascript" src="{$config->resourceBase}js/rest.js"></script>{literal}
<script>
jQuery(document).ready(function($){
  $('#current_employer').crmAutocomplete({params:{contact_type:'Organization'}});
});
</script>
{/literal}

{/if}

The problem is, upon Drupal registration, we want to collect Current Employer information, because new users will, more than likely, belong to an organization that is currently already in our Database.  Without an autocomplete field for Current Employer, we run the frequent risk of creation of duplicate Organizational contacts, if someone spells the name of their company just slightly differently than the next person.

Any way to safely use Autocomplete for Current Employer on registration without exposing our entire database to the universe?  PS. We are ok with everyone having access to all our Organization names, as all Orgs are all public anyhow.

Well I did a lot of testing with this.  Here's what I found out:

1. If someone is logged in, the autocomplete field works in two ways:
   a. search for matching contact
   b. if no matching contact, create new contact

2. If someone is NOT logged in, the code above doesn't work.
   a. it does convert the field to an autocomplete field
   b. the autocomplete field doesn't have any search capabilities

Any idea why 2.b. is true?  Is this some kind of security feature?  Am I missing something?

In my situation, although admittedly not ALL situations, all our organizations are public and we WANT people to find their information.  Individuals are another matter, of course, and should be private.  Since we are able to further filter the result sets for autocomplete fields to Organizations who belong in group X, then any risk of exposing Organization data publicly (for an administrator who knows what they are doing) approaches zero.

Autocomplete only works for logged in people? If so, why?  Is there a way to override this?   Seems to hinder the usefulness of this autocomplete feature.  Thanks........

hi,

the autocomplete uses the rest interface, that isn't available to anon users.

you might want to write a custom module that only exposes the functions you want.

Any progress on that ?

X+