CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hey guys,

This has been discussed briefly in a different topic in APIs Forum http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php?topic=18728

In a nutshell, so that the changes to group and tags be extracted using API, the change to a group or a tag has to be logged in the database. This requires that CiviCRM should log when a contact is added to a Group or a tag.

We have discussed that one way this can be achieved is by extending the existing civicrm_log table to have, action (create, update, delete) and id_contact fields and then populate the existing field to log the changes with civicrm_activity, civicrm_contact, civicrm_domain, civicrm_event, civicrm_participant (already there), civicrm_group_contact and civicrm_entity_tag (new to be added).

Once this is done, we will have to extend the BAO for group_contact and tag_contact to start logging the changes. (Thanks to Xavier for the valuable suggestions)

We would like to know what the opinion of the core team is and steps forward to get this implemented as soon as possible so that we can proceed further with CiviSync.

Thanks
Rohit

I agree this can be achieved using hooks but would like to get this included in the core if possible.

I will take the offer for the code, it may help us get things moving quickly and by the time the improvements are made to the core. Will send you a PM.

Well guys, I really need to know what the thoughts are here. Even if they are not to include this in the core. Lobo, David could you please let us know what do you think.

Has anyone else other than ourselves and icdweb had a need of the feature?

Being able to retrieve more detailed 'last_modified' data when syncing contacts would be really useful. At the moment I query CiviCRM for contacts modified after a certain date to sync with an accounts package but more control over what 'modified' means would be great.

It would also be really useful to have this sort of 'real' log information display on the contact change log tab (and preferably log changes rather than activities when contributions are made but I'm probably out on a limb with that one.) I think when a contact was tagged / when a tag was removed is the sort of thing users expect to see on the change log tab from the feedback we get

Hey polestar:

Seems like this is essential for CiviSync. If you can achieve this via a hook, i would definitely go with that approach thus avoiding the issue of if/when it gets into core.

I think using one table to record all changes made to a contact (or its associated records like contributions / events etc) does not seem very scalable. The log table as used currently does have scale issues and we dont have an archival / compression policy either. So adding more objects while solving this issue makes the rapidly growing nature a bit worse

lobo

Yes; it seems like an separate module will be the way to go.

@lobo CiviSync version 1 is still working away without the group logging functionality. it synchronises all the groups every time a sync process runs. But this will be the efficient way of doing it.

Looking at the suggestions above I think others think there is a need for this to be there in the core.

I think for now we are going to integrate this in our CMS Component/Module which is already developed to manage the API Keys and Site Key.

Until next time...

tags is the module name
so in drupalese, that means --
implement the hook in module tags called civicrm_post