CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

We're looking into a way of improving the user experience on public searches through Drupal. With public search profiles it's all too easy to return no results which can be frustrating. So the idea is to use AJAX to update the options so in our imaginary profile which contains countries and drinks and shows drinks producers as the results, when you select 'cider', Germany is de-selected since cider is not produced there but France, Spain, England and Ireland are left selected. Then if you select France as well, stout will be deselected since stout is not produced there. I hope that gives enough of an idea.

So my question is would the best way to approach this be to start with profiles or use Drupal's Views module? And does anyone have any helpful hints, code snippets, warnings or any other useful thoughts that might help us on our way. Either way I assume we'd wrap it up as Drupal module for general use/feedback/improvements.

Thanks

DaveM

Hi,

would write a custom module and use civiCRM+some custom ajax/rest interface

To get you started, might have a look at this one
http://github.com/tttp/civiview

X+

Hi,

We just spent a gazillion hours moving a big dev from staging to prod. Had major issues with moving the nodes (hint: users+taxonomy+... will be different), major pain to migrate workflow config and in general, the only think that migrated smoothly was what is in good old text files, either config or code. If you can shove it into git, it's fine, otherwise, it's a pain in the neck.

So yes, I'd rather have a couple of lines of code to change than having to click endlessly on  the profile/view configuration. Having to roll it out on one site is already a good reason not to use view, to quite a few would be a dealmaker

This being said, might be that we don't know the right drupal tools to make the migration slightly less painful.  But how I'd like to have something like south in django....

X+

OK when I said rolling it out, I meant implementing the better search func on several sites some of which currently have a very simple profile search along the lines of [geographical area] and [audience] both as checkboxes. So it would be pretty trivial to redo these as views and this certainly wouldn't influence our decision on whether to go with views or profiles. For me the advantage of using profiles or views is that maintenance of the actual search (or creation of new searches) stays with the admins through the UI and we don't have to change code each time. Also doing it that way makes it more available for non-coders.

Really I was just thinking will it be more painful to interfere with how views does things or to do the ajax stuff from profiles. Personally I love the power of Views, but can imagine this is more hard work.

Peterd - wasn't thinking of features for this as it should be just providing a smoother end user interface and the site admin does the config in the view (or profile) which would be different in every case.