CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I apologize profusely in advance if this is a very stupid question...I'm kinda new using CiviCRM  I am using CiviCRM 3.0.0 on Joomla 1.5.22.

I am trying to customize the columns in my contact search results by creating a custom profile as outlined in item 1 of the "Custom+Data+in+Search+Result" page from the 3.0 documentation FAQ section (sorry I'm not allowed to post the direct link )

However when I "go to Advanced Seach and select your profile in the "Search Views" dropdown"...my profile does not appear in the drop down, so I can't apply it to the search.

My profile is listed in the "Administer CiviCRM"->CiviCRM profile list; it is enabled, and is the only one in the list where "Used For" is set to "Search Results". As far as I can tell, the profile includes valid data fields from three valid "Types" (Individual, Contact, Participant). If I set other profiles to "Used for Search results", they appear in the dropdown, but my new profile doesn't. My new profile doesn't include any fields that aren't included in one of the other profiles that do appear in the dropdown when Search Results is activated.

It seems like this would be a common problem and/or I'm missing something obvious, but I haven't managed to find anything in the forums about this. Thanks in advance!

Thanks for the response xavier!  I figured it must be something like that. 

However, that still leaves me with the same problem....how to generate a data result that includes fields from disparate types.  What is the best way to accomplish that in CiviCRM? Write a custom report? I'm a database geek so my first instinct is to grab the data schema and write some SQL, but I'd like to be able to advise some non-tech CiviCRM users on the best way to achieve this.

Basically what I'm after is a list of all participants registered for a specific event, but with certain custom fields from each participant's contact type also available in the result set.

I'm reviewing the "Extending CiviCRM" chapter of the book, and it does seem like a Custom Search is going to be the way to go. Yay an opportunity to start writing "code" inside CiviCRM ;-)  though I was hoping that I could manage it without resorting to SQL.

Appreciate your patience and pointing me in the right direction, I'm still trying to get my head around the data model of contact/individual/participant and how they interact. I'm starting to suspect that whoever built the custom data model I'm working with didn't quite understand it all either.

In recent versions (3.2 or 3.3 +) the Participant Listing report includes support for displaying custom participant fields. You could probably extend that pretty easily to also include custom contact or individual fields.