CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi guys,

I'm pretty new with CiviCRM and I wanted to know if there is any way (or workaround) to link some custom fields (selection style) in cascade, filtering the options by AJAX.

It would have the same behaviour as Country ->  State/Province in the address tab.. Selecting the country filters the State's options.
So I need to do the same but with custom fields, and there will be like 4 or 5 dropdowns linked in cascade

Thanks in advance!!

Tx Xavier for your answer,

so the best approach it's to create a custom template for this?
I'm little worried cause the intention it's that these fields will be used in the New Individual Contact form (in the Address tab) so if I modified this template and eventually I upgrade the civiCRM version I have to be very careful to not lose these changes and verify that are compatible with the future versions.. of course using the API might guaranty the compatibility I guess..

I will research more in detail, any suggestion if someone had the same scenario will be more than welcome.

luc

If the fields exist on the page already, you don't need to customize the template actually. All of your functionality can be achieved purely via jQuery, on the client side. If the fields aren't there, I think you could just make them using the regular CiviCRM interface for creating custom fields.

You just need to add the required handlers to the various select objects, and then write the server side code to send the new content for each. This you would do in a custom Drupal module you would write.

The other issue would be the location of the fields, as custom fields won't go next to the default State dropdown. However, moving the field on the page can also be done via jQuery. Or you could hide the 'real' field and add a "fake" field via jQuery and then onsubmit, just transfer the value from fake to real so it's submitted to the backend.

Or you could customize templates as noted, but I would think a jQuery approach would be worth the higher initial investment, because then upgrades should be easier to handle.

how do you manage to inject the jquery in the form without doing a custom template ?

Hi. jQuery can be added either via a customized Drupal theme or via a custom Drupal module.