CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi,

Just out of a training, where we have a 3 levels group structure (around 70 groups in total),
The group hierarchy is something like this:
- Media
-- Press
--- National
--- European
-- TV
-- Blog
...
- Members
...
- Institutions
-- European
--- Parliament
...
-- National

So far so good, and they really use it and do targeted mailing

However, both for the search, advanced search, the mailing...
You have a flat list, so

Blog
European
European
Institutions
...

Ok, obviously you can't know that the first European contains the European Journalists, and the second for the european public servants.

The workaround I have been using for a while is to put prefixes (Media - Euro, Institution - Euro) as groups name, but it's still quite un unser friendly to have a flat list of quite a few groups, and feels quite a bit clunky.

Am I the only one having this issue? How do you manage when you start having quite a few groups?

Asking otherwise: Any specific reason we don't have tree like selection for the group selections?

X+

1) Part of the issue is the default config. At least with the tags as it by default only 1st level tags, people don't realise that this feature exists.

2) Kyle unblocked me, by suggesting to use the same system as the tag tag for the civimail selection (eg tree with checkboxes).

Anyway, bit of a chicken and egg problem: as the group hierarchy isn't properly exposed in the UI, you don't use much the hierarchy, and as you don't use it you don't need to expose it.

I'd argue that as soon as you got a few handful of groups, you'd be better using a hierarchy.

How many groups do you have on your installs ?

Was was bugging me was the single select containing all the groups without taking into account the hierarchy (and all the tags)

Say you got these groups:

- Journalists
-- Human rights
-- International
- supporter
-- members
-- human rights

What about instead having

in : + big list
-- (any group)
- human rights
- Human rights
- International
- Journalists
- members
- supporter

(note that you don't have any idea of what the human rights is about without the parent)

Having the group select split up based on the first level

in Journalist
-- (don't filter)
-- Human rights
-- International

in supporter
-- don't filter)
-- members
-- human rights

If you select any of the item in one of the group, it hides the others (eg you can have one and only one group on simple search)

Already a step in the right direction, isn't it ?

What do you think ?