CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Have somebody that would be interested and can contribute something towards it. Uses would be like:

• Show me all the individuals who have a relationship with any member of a specified set of contacts, where set of contacts might be something like contacts that have a given tag (but might be more general)
• Show me all the people who work at an organization whose primary address is in _insert_city_
• Show me all the people who were at a meeting with someone from organization_name this year (i.e., their relationship is not recorded as a relationship, but comes from having both been involved in a common activity)

The last one could be out of scope.

The first one you could probably replace "set of contacts" with "contact or group", because you could always do a regular search of some kind to create the group, then "Show me all the contacts with a relationship with any member of _group_name_".

I have written a custom search that I call "the adult child relationship search" . I will attach it to the wiki page.  It allows a person ( typically a teacher or the education director) to pull up all the parents of the kids in grade x.   The only filter is the group that that the kid is in.

It only looks for the "parent of" relationship. I am planning to enhance it to allow it to grab parents and stepparents in the same results. ( Or even any authorized relationship, as some kids are raised by their grandparent or other legal guardian)

It may be a useful starting point to improve on. 

Hey there,

Glad that there is a lot of interest in this topic - it is contact RELATION management after all

"Creating a custom search seems relatively easy and is probably the next step forward"

I think that the seperation makes this possibly the easiest to understand conceptually: you seperate out the three objects:

* "All organisations with the major donor tag" 
* "All finance directors"
* "all employees"

The fact that you do this before hand means you don't have to remember where you are in the process.

Compared with the task workflow "find related contacts" that might get confusing or have too many steps to remember, e.g. 'Hang on a minute, where was I again?  Did I select the right group in the first place?'

The essence of the task workflow it seems is:
*carry out an advanced searched
*select the find related contacts task
*choose a relationship
*carry out another advanced search
*select the task you want to carry out

You could potentially see that as a five step wizard / concertina.

I take your point about group profileration, but maybe that is a seperate issue that needs addressing somewhere else.  I see a lot of organisations which have loads of groups already in there CiviCRM.  That could be to do with group visibility - are all groups always visible - should we organise groups a bit better than just alphabetically.  But that is another question

i think the goal is to reduce the number of steps, and in general there are lots of use cases that we cant think of. I basically think would be nice to allow search queries to be modified via a hook. Two simple types would be:

* filter - which restricts the search to a smaller set

* transformer - which basically takes a "set of contacts" and returns "a different set" based on some criteria

i do think both of them can be accomplished via a hook. In our current case, the "transformer" would also need what "relationship" type to return, so:

gimme all the "parents" of kids who are in group A and have custom values B and C. So the transformer needs another "search" element, i.e. relationship type to be useful. I suspect there will be other transformers also

i'll see what i can come up with if i'm awake on the plane ride

lobo