CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I'm a newbie.  I made a sweet group of custom fields for a custom data set and had everything running the way I wanted it... until I realized that I chose "Contacts" rather than "Individuals" for the custom data group.

Now adding a new organization requires filling out an inapplicable data field. What I want to do is change the field "Used For" under settings to be Individuals. Alas, that's the one thing I can't change.  I don't really want to delete and rebuild the whole dataset just to change this one field.  I also don't really want to build a parallel dataset and use an existing list to fill in fields because that's convoluted and messy for a brand new database, making it pretty hard for future admins to figure out where to go to update the field menu.

Any suggestions? 

Hmm - I think you actually want to use your exisiting set of custom fields only for Individuals (not for all types of contacts). You can't change this in the interface once some records have been created, since that would potentially cause data integrity problems.

If you're comfortable w/ MySQL, AND all the contacts you've already populated these custom fields for ARE indeed Individuals - i think you can safely use a SQL query or phpMyAdmin to update the "extends" column value in civicrm_custom_group (it's an enum and you can change it from 'Contact' to 'Individual'. If you're not comforatable doing that, then you'll need to rebuild your custom data field definitions and use export -> import as suggested above.