CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I think most folks use one or the other option. You might try playing around with what happens if you modify the "Addressee" value for a particular household to be empty (edit household, communications preferences pane). If that fixes things, you'll probably need to do a manual sQL update to fix this for your existing households. You can fix behavior for new households by modifying the default household addressee format (Administer > Option Lists > Addressee Formats).

If this doesn't help, you might need to dig into the code a bit to fix - since it seems like a bit of a bug to be spitting out two contact.address lines.

Hmm - I might not be understanding how folks are using this myself. My point about "one or the other" was related to my sense that some folks use household contact records heavily, and others don't use them at all.

I think the functionality was spec'd by Brian Shaugnessy (lcdweb on this form and IRC). Might be better to try and grab him and get his thoughts on "expected behaviors".

Code for Export is in CRM/Export/BAO/Export.php - see mergeSameAddress() and mergeSameHousehold()
Code for Mailing Labels is in CRM/Contact/Form/Task/Label.php - same function names.

Hi Lindsey - Some responses inline...

I need to be able to select groups of individuals for a whole range of purposes (eg by membership type, group, custom field) and then mailmerge labels and letters effectively for them, using the 'merge by households' option.  But... when you action labels, 'merge by address' selected alone works, but 'merge by household' doesn't.  And when you action an export, 'merge by household' works successfully but 'merge by address' doesn't.  Is this just a bug that needs fixing?

There certainly might be a bug in these merge actions. Best bet is to create a simple set of a few contacts on the public demo and run the two merges, recording what the outputs ARE vs. what you're expecting. If you see a problem, post back here with details on what was in the records, what the output was and what it should have been. The demo DB gets reset periodically but I'll try to jump on it quickly after you post back. (I do think other folks are using these functions and I haven't seen a bug report - but ....).

An aside is that we also want to mailmerge letters within Civi using pdf templates to write to individuals and couples selected (often within the same group).  The pdf letter action only seems to cope with individuals.  Can it recognise and deal with both couples and individuals in any given list? eg Dear Sam, Dear Tim & Bev.  If that's the case, is it possible to set up the addressee field in household records so that they draw automatically from a couple's records so that a mailmerge or merge by households exercise includes a couple's title eg Dear Tim & Bev.

In a nutshell, our needs seem very simple - select groups of people (including a mix of individuals and couples) and print off labels and mailmerged letters to them within Civi with appropriate addressing/titles.  This must be very easily possible but for some reason we just can't see it.  Any thoughts greatly appreciated.  Thanks.

I'm not clear on what you mean by "The pdf letter action only seems to cope with individuals". You can definitely select the Print PDF Letter action for multiple contacts of various contact types and have it create the letters. If the issue is about the "greetings" used in the "merge" - the standard approach is to set the Postal Greeting field for contacts as you want them addressed in letters - and then using the {contact.postal_greeting} token. For individuals, this is set to a default of "Dear {contact.first_name}" when records are created. But for households, we haven't figured out an auto-magical way to populate the Postal Greeting that works for all the variations of "householding" - so you'll have to either set those by editing the household records (from Communications Prefrences pane in Edit Contact form). If that's too onerous, I'm pretty sure you can do an import / update to set "Postal Greeting Custom" field to desired values but a set of households (after manipulating an exported spreadsheet file to set values in a column as needed - e.g. 'Dear Tim and Bev' for a simple 2 person household, 'Dear Stumptown Gang' for a wacky group of student roommates, etc.).

We've gone through quite a few iterations trying to accommodate all the "very simple" combinations of people and household data that folks store in their DBs - so hopefully the existing options can work for you. Otherwise, there's always the option of using a hook to automatically set household greetings using a pattern that works for your data.

Hi Dave,

I have been working with Lindsey on setting up Civi. Thanks for your reply, I have done a test household and done labels, export and PDF letter for each on the demo database as suggested

My Household is Fred, Joe and Sara Bloggs with Stephen Bloggs not in the household as a 'control'!
When selecting them all, including the household, and going to Mailing Labels and merging by Household  I get the expected results of one label for the bloggs household and one for Stephen Bloggs

But when selecting only the individuals and not the household and trying to create labels merged by household it creates labels for each individual (i.e. 4 labels instead of 2)

Whereas if you select "export contacts" and you do not select the household just the individuals then it will just export the two records, one for the Bloggs household and one for Stephen Bloggs as expected.

When trying to "Print PDF letter for contacts" there does not seem to be an option to merge by household to merge by address, the only way I found of doing it was to only select the household and not the individuals in the household.

There seems to be different results each of the different was of doing it, ideally we would like it to be like the "export contacts" way and when you select multiple individuals within a household it will merge them as otherwise we would have to include the Household record in every group where we want to merge from.

Hope that makes sense!

Dowd

Lindsay / Dowd - It does sound like there might be a bug in the Mailing Labels merge and a missing feature (merges) in the PDF Letter feature. I'm not all that familiar with the expected behavior for the merges :-( I'll ask a colleague who was involved in spec'ing these to take a look a chime in here.

Seems like you do have a workaround for now of using the export which does what you need - and then doing a mail merge in Word or Open Office to get the mailing labels printed. 

Issue logged - http://issues.civicrm.org/jira/browse/CRM-8338

Merge options for PDF letters hasn't come up a lot (or at all in my recollection) as a feature request. So although it seems useful, you'll probably need to come up with some resources (sponsorship $ or contributed code) to make it happen in the short term. If you're interested in pursuing either, let us know.