CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I have created a smart group of members whose email is flagged "On Hold". If I look at an individual record then view the groups listed behind the groups tab, I do not see membership in the smart group I have created. (v1.9)

It's worth noting that if you manually add a Contact to a Smart Group (by clicking Add to Group from the Contact's record) then the contact WILL show up in the list of Groups under the Contact's Group tab.

However, if the Contact is in a Smart Group simply by virtue of meeting the search criteria of the Smart Group, then the Smart group will (as you say) not appear in the Groups tab.

3.2 will not include this feature. if important to you consider contributing a patch to make this happen. Do ensure that you take performance into consideration when there are hundreds of smart groups (i.e. we cant evaluate 100+ complex queries on that page)

there is a smart group cache (civicrm_group_contact_cache) that will give you this information. however its a cache, and potentially can be stale

lobo

We are in the process of upgrading to 3.x now and our "country administrators" have been thinking that the smart groups problem will be fixed. Unfortunately, preliminary testing (with 3.14) shows that the problem is still there. Once a smart group is created, it doesn't appear in lists of groups available for searching to the person who created the smart group and it does not show in lists of groups contacts belong to.

Since this is probably not going to be fixed for some time, is there any way to disable the function all together so that we don't have to keep disappointing people?

Agreed with Dave, Smart Groups work as expected.  However, we may be talking past each other here.

Let me jump in.

Smart Groups don't show up in the Contact Record under the Groups tab.  This is perhaps a failure less of the software itself but in the naming of "Smart Groups" - the very name seems to confuses people, as it confused me at first.  Why should not something called "Smart Group" appear under the "Groups" tab, you ask?  It's a reasonable assumption, but untrue.

Instead...... think of Smart Groups instead as "Saved Searches".  From now on I will refer to Smart Groups as "Saved Searches".

When Search criteria is saved as a Saved Search, the Saved Search remembers your criteria and updates the results automatically when you view the Saved Search.  Loading several Saved Searches on each Contact Record page would be incredibly time consuming, as it would result in loading perhaps dozens of Saved Searches each time you looked at a Contact.

Right, "ok so what's the solution" you ask?

I've found the best solution is to create a cache for your Saved Searches.  This means that periodically (once a week) you look at the members of a Saved Search and assign these members to either 1) a static Group or 2) a Tag.  Then these Groups and Tags WILL show up in the Contact record.  Once a week, clear out the static Group or Tag and repeat the process.  While not "real time" it is better than nothing.

xavier: there is no code.  It's just using existing functionality.

1. Select all members of a smart group x
2. Click "Add to Group": create a new static group called "Cache of smart group x"
3. Next week, remove all contacts from "Cache of smart group x"
4. Repeat steps 1 and 2.

Some people prefer to use Tags in step 2, because Tags show up on the Summary page of a Contact record, and are therefore more convenient to see.  Works the same way.

i think you can do this, the main issue is no one has taken the next step of implementing the views interface for smart groups. currently most of the views interface exposes table and column definitions to views2. not sure how extensible the api is, and if it can take sql snippets (from and where clauses)

wanna take a crack at it, coleman?

lobo

What permissions does the user have who can't see the new smart group? Also do you have CiviCRM ACL's setup on your site? Ideally we can recreate the behavior you're seeing on the public demo - but you might need to instrument in some debug statements in your site to see what's happening. Grab one of us on IRC if you want some pointers to where in the code to do that.