CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

On my Drupal/CiviCRM site, I've exposed a few CiviCRM data fields, some pre-defined, some me-defined, as profile fields. Thus they show up in a user's Drupal account form where the user can view and edit them. This is all good.

What I want to know is, if I write a Drupal module, can I access the profile fields within my module? Typically a module can access a user's Drupal attributes, but what about a user's CiviCRM attributes? If this can be done, how do I do it? I need to be able to read the fields, but I'd also like to be able to change them. Any thoughts?

OK, I'm off to a good start. I've managed to write a trivial module that can read the details for a user and update one of the user's attributes.

So far I've used the following functions:

• crm_uf_get_match_id: to convert a Drupal user id into a CiviCRM contact id
• crm_get_contact: to retrieve the data for a contact id
• crm_update_contact: to update the user's nick name
• crm_uf_get_profile_fields: to get the data about my custom profile - haven't really made use of this data though

I have a few follow-up questions.
*) It was quite easy to update a user's nickname. I simply set params to array('nick_name', <new nick name>) and called crm_update_contact and voila. However, how do I achieve the same result for a more complicated field (eg. first name) or a custom value (eg. custom_values[0]['value'])? What do insert into my params array?
*) I've got a custom data field that I'm using in a profile I've defined. It's of the 'select' type, ie. a drop-down list. Is there a simple way to display this data field in my own form? That is, how do I get the field to appear as a drop-down list in my form without having to build the select HTML myself.

Here's the code I've written, based on the example you gave for Q1. It correctly updates the nick name for the user, but not their custom field (which is a select, so I'm using the int value for a label). Can you suggest why it doesn't work for the custom field?

  $params = array('contact_id' => $cid);
  $contact = crm_get_contact($params);
  $cf1 = crm_get_custom_field(array('id' => 1)); // I know it's field 1
  $cfid = 'custom_' . $cf1->id;
  $uparams = array(
      'nick_name' => 'Nick #1',
      $cfid => 5,
  );
  $contact = crm_update_contact($contact, $uparams);