CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi,

I have a profile on a registration form for an event asking among other things for the current employer.

Having a free form is a source of a lot of problems, because each participant from the same organisation is likely to spell it differently, use the acronym, prefix with the country...

For some events the list of possible organisations is predefined (eg. the members' organisations). Or mostly defined (that list, plus an option "other" and a free form).

I thought about changing the template of the form and put a drop down (or autocomplete), but

1) As the param you send when you save is the name of the organization and not the id, you will have problems with duplicates (even if you choose "ACME" id 42, if you have another ACME org in your db, it won't know that's the 42 you want as you only send ACME, so it will get all confused and create a 3rd ACME).

2) I'm likely to have different profiles willing to use that "predefined list of acceptable organizations", so rather than having the customisation at the profile level, I'd rather have it at the field level (more a feeling than an hard constraint)

3) I can't use a contact reference autocomplete, cause I want anonymous to register

I'm thinking of creating a new int custom field "predefined organisations" that is with view only/PHP

having a buildForm and create the select with option value=contact_id and name == name

and on the post hook use the id to put it into the current employee

Bit clumsy, do you have a better idea ?

X+

Convinced that the hook is not at the most efficient level. IMO, the best it to have an api that returns the 10 contacts that matches best the query. This can allow to go further than a single query. (eg having the list of the most common contacts if query is empty, search on like query%, then if it returns less than 10, replace by %query%...

But that for api on 4.x, that will allow to offer the access to anonymous and do smarter stuff. stay tuned.

In the meantime, not sure what's best.

X+

Hi,

By moving that autocomplete field to use the api instead of custom ajax backend, you can then provide a really simple tool where by changing the url you can filter.

previously bloged about it:
http://civicrm.org/blogs/xavier/how-customise-contact-reference-custom-field

So for the same amount, you could:
- Migrate the backend to be part of the api (so that quick search feature is also available for other),
- add a configuration field so you can change if you want to filter by group, tag, sub_type, group and tag and country and custom field X...)
- and be happy ever after.

X+



X+

Xavier - Makes sense to look at using the api as part of this "project" if the MIH gets funded. Can you sketch out how you think the UI might work for "add a configuration field so you can change if you want to filter by group, tag, sub_type, group and tag and country and custom field X...)". I'm a bit at loss to imagine a simple UI which does that - hence the idea of using a group as the filter (smart groups can aggregate almost any combination of the above using Adv Search UI).

Hi,

Simple (I like simplicity)

1) Modify the template used to display the autocomplete to use an api (qsearch) instead of the custom end point, say api(contact, quicksearch). This returns json

(that's what I've done in the blog, but that's even more simple, because you don't have to undo the default autocomplete)


2) Modify the field autocomplete so you can store (somewhere, not sure where, in the option table?)  the url of the ajax api

by default, that will be "/civicrm/ajax/rest&json=1&entity=Contact&action=quicksearch"

3) the poweruser can change and replace by
/civicrm/ajax/rest&json=1&entity=Contact&action=get&group=42&country=fr&tag=123

or whatever wicked param they want

4) for the normal user, you display a list of group {crmAPI entity="Group" action="get"}, when you click on the group it (in js) generates the ajax api
/civicrm/ajax/rest&json=1&entity=Contact&action=get&group=42{idofthegroup)

and is used like for 3.

The only change outside of templates/api is offer the option to set the url api on the customfield, and save it somewhere.

X+

One other thing which we should allow is the ability for an anonymous user (or non-permissioned user) to choose a contact from the list (even though this user does not have access to these contacts)

I do hope the API does not allow the above case for all contacts

lobo