CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I'm using CiviEvent for my organization (a performing arts organization) to sell tickets to a concert event.  In this case, people can purchase tickets online with a credit card, and we'll send them the paper tickets by mail. 

For the most part I've been able to set everything up very nicely so that the process is smooth.  The one gotcha that remains is that if someone buys a few tickets, then a while later comes back & wants to buy more, they get a warning/error saying "Oops.  It looks like you are already registered for this event."  Since the person thinks they're just trying to buy tickets, not "register" for an event, this is confusing, and stands in the way of them buying the tickets.

Is there a way for us to turn off this behavior, and just let someone purchase tickets as many times as they want, without warnings?  Creating multiple registration records is still fine (in fact, it's necessary, because we need to know when to send out more tickets in the mail).

I thought perhaps using the "Allow multiple registrations from the same email address?" setting in the Online Registration configuration might be what I'm looking for, but I do have that checked and people still get prevented from buying two rounds of tickets.

Thanks for your thoughts.

IMO there is no such a soft settings which allows you to have multiple registration from same person.

you might want to take a close look for register multiple participant in a single go feature .

so any participant could register as many persons/seats for given event, but which would not allow to register same person twice.

I think better work around would be from contact tab -> Event -> either you could update registration or you could delete those registrations and allow to register again.

OR you might want to use / register participant using different data, so system should uniquely identify participants.

One short-term workaround would be to change the "Oops" warning, telling them that they could call in their order over the phone.  Anyone know how I can do that?

You need to write a custom code which suppress this validation.
go to CRM/Event/Form/Registration/Register.php line around 1153 and take a look for
CRM_Event_Form_Registration_Register::checkRegistration( ); function.

 
kiran

Hey, have you looked at "Contributions" section in Civi? (you may need to enable it here /civicrm/admin/setting/component&reset=1)

Basically allows the same email address to put money toward an event many times. Not sure how it would fit in with you specific event / ticket requirements but it is worth a look.

YB

I think it should work, but I'm having trouble using the same Price Set as I use on my Event page.  In the Price Set sections, on the "2. Amounts" tab while configuring the Contribution, I see "No Price Set has been configured / enabled for your site...".

Anything special I need to do to get Price Sets to work in a Contribution?

Using Price Sets is working well for us to let someone buy multiple tickets in one shot, so I think that part is taken care of.  The only issue is if they come back & want to buy more tickets later.

We've been selling tickets with price sets for some time now and get around this just by ticking the "Allow multiple registrations from the same email address?" box in the Online Registration section for the event.  (And leaving "Register multiple participants?" unticked.)

This was working fine for us last month in 3.2.4.  Has there been a recent change that breaks this?

Thanks for testing this, kmarkley.  So, it seems like the "Allow multiple registrations from the same email address?" feature simply got broken in some update somewhere.  I do have that box checked too.

I'm willing to help investigate if someone could point me in the right direction in the code.

Maybe also worth mentioning a bit about this (and comment by me) in the 3.2 roadmap:
http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/CiviCRM+v3.2

Recent forum discussion about what the behavior should be:
http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,16672.0.html

A thread and issue regarding registering multiple participants:
http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,13696.0.html
http://issues.civicrm.org/jira/browse/CRM-6708

Generally, I've read stuff about possibly changing the way this works, but I've found nothing (so far) indicating a deliberate change had already been made.

Thanks for the clarification.

the "Allow multiple registrations from the same email address?" was designed for the one person registering multiple people via the same registration form

This amounts to saying that if "Register multiple participants?" is unchecked, then "Allow multiple registrations..." has no intended purpose, correct?  Yet kenahoo and I have a use case for exactly this (otherwise useless) combination of settings.  Might I humbly suggest that our use case is the correct behavior in this situation?

Here is a quick and dirty patch that seems to work:

--- civicrm/CRM/Event/Form/Registration/Register.php.orig 2010-12-29 22:08:56.000000000 -0600
+++ civicrm/CRM/Event/Form/Registration/Register.php 2010-12-29 22:47:00.000000000 -0600
@@ -1204,12 +1204,15 @@
             $participant->role_id    = $self->_values['event']['default_role_id'];
             $participant->is_test    = 0;
 
+            $allow_same_participant_emails = $self->_values['event']['allow_same_participant_emails'];
+
             $participant->find( );
             require_once 'CRM/Event/PseudoConstant.php';
             $statusTypes = CRM_Event_PseudoConstant::participantStatus( null, "is_counted = 1" );
             while ( $participant->fetch( ) ) {
                 if ( array_key_exists ( $participant->status_id, $statusTypes ) ) {
                     if ( !$isAdditional ) {
+                      if ( !$allow_same_participant_emails ) {
                         $registerUrl = CRM_Utils_System::url( 'civicrm/event/register',
                                                       "reset=1&id={$self->_values['event']['id']}&cid=0" );
                         $status = ts("Oops. It looks like you are already registered for this event. If you want to change your registration, or you feel that you've gotten this message in error, please contact the site administrator.")
@@ -1221,6 +1224,11 @@
                             $url .= '&action=preview';
                         }
                         CRM_Utils_System::redirect( $url );
+                      } else {
+                        $status = ts("Oops. It looks like you are already registered for this event. Continue only if you want to create additional registration(s) in your name.") ;
+                        $session->setStatus( $status );
+                        return $participant->id;
+                      }
                     }
 
                     if ( $isAdditional ) {

Or maybe there is a better way to do it?