CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi,

The customValue api is a new way we are looking at to do custom fields. Unfortunately a version made it into the release that I don't think is final (last seen I was hoping that Coleman and Xavier would agree the last few points).

However, for 90% of use cases the CustomValue api is not required as you can simply do this

$params = array('version' => 3,
                       'display_name' => 'Clarke Kent',
                      'custom_12' => 'red cape')
civicrm_api('contact','create',$params);

that will create a contact called 'Clarke Kent' with custom field # 12 set to red cape.

If you want to update an existing contact pass in the 'id' field

Eileen

Thanks Eileen, that worked great for me.

I also wasn't aware that you had to use custom_1 etc as the key instead of the actual name of the key (in my case official_provincial_riding_1).

Maybe this could be added to the documentation somewhere for the api. Happy to contribute to it, but not sure how.

Brian

To edit the FLOSS Manual, go to http://booki.flossmanuals.net/, create an account, then sign in, click on the CiviCRM book's link, and edit the relevant section of the book. Not sure if there is an approval process on the privileges for editting the book. If so, try contact michaelmcandrew

Hi bpmccain,

Your attempt to use the CustomValue API failed because the parameters were not correct.

There are different ways you can specify custom fields - with IDs, names or labels. However, it looks like you tried using column names (civicrm_custom_field.column_name) which is not valid.

You could have used database IDs (civicrm_custom_field.id) thus:

    $additionalParams = array(
        'version' => 3,
        'id' => $contactID,
        'custom_1' => $ridingNumber,
        'custom_6' => $pollNumber,
        'custom_10' => $pollSuffix,
        'custom_11' => $addressID
    );

Alternatively you could have identified the field using its name (civicrm_custom_field.name) or label (civicrm_custom_field.label). With either of these you must also supply an argument to identify the group to which the field belongs using the group's name (civicrm_custom_group.name) or title (civicrm_custom_group.title). The arguments are separated by colons, so your code would look something like this:

    $additionalParams = array(
        'version' => 3,
        'id' => $contactID,
        'custom_riding_number:official_provincial_riding' => $ridingNumber,
        'custom_poll_number:official_provincial_riding_poll' => $pollNumber,
        'custom_poll_suffix:official_provincial_riding_poll' => $pollSuffix,
        'custom_address_id:address' => $addressID
    );

This assumes that the groups are not multi-valued. If they are then you need to add an extra numerical argument; the ID of the custom value record, or -1 for a new value, e.g.:

        'custom_poll_number:official_provincial_riding_poll:-1' => $pollNumber,

Group name/title can be left blank if the field name is globally unique, e.g.:

        'custom_poll_number::-1' => $pollNumber,

Some of this I got from the comments at the top of civicrm/api/v3/CustomValue.php. Unfortunately these comments are incomplete and misleading. They state that arguments should be supplied in the order of group_name:field_name but I had to look into the code of that file and of civicrm/CRM/Core/BAO/CustomField.php to determine that the expected order is actually field_name:group_name.

I must say I find it disappointing that CiviCRM 4 was released with the custom fields API so unfinished and undocumented. This problem has cost me a lot of time and I'm sure I'm not the only one who's been struggling with it.

It's unfortunate CustomValue was included in a release because the version that was included was not the final one

I get an exception when trying to set a custom field's value on an existing contact that has not had the custom field value set. It is not a multiple value field.

e.g. this API call (derived from API explorer)
example.org/civicrm/ajax/rest?version=3&custom_7=yay&id=105&fnName=civicrm%2FContact%2Fcreate&json=1

will set (update) custom field 7 to "yay" if contact 105 has previously had that field set to something, but if not I get "One of parameters (value: ) is not of the type Integer". custom_7 is not an integer field type. Looks like the UPDATE works but not the CREATE?

I'm on CiviCRM 4.0.5.

Looks buggy to me, (and Kurund + Michal couldn't figure it either!), but perhaps there's some designed reason for this?

Thanks.
Rich

Recent changes have only focussed on 'GET' , not 'create'