CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I am looking to improve the capabilities of a search page on a site (Drupal 6 / civiCRM 3.4.5).

Currently we have exposed civiCRM "Individual" custom data to Drupal's Views module and have created a search results view. It works well but there have been several occasions where the view has crashed and the search filters are ignored so all of the records are listed out in the search results page regardless of weather they are supposed to be in the search index or not. The fix is to clear Drupal's cache but there is no rhyme or reason for the crash so I am looking for a different method. I'm looking at Search Builder on the civiCRM side.

What I would like to do is be able to create a search input page (in Drupal) with all of the criteria that I would like to search for and run it directly against civiCRM the way the search builder does and then provide the results page in Drupal. I'm looking for something programmatic as using iFrames and that sort of thing will not do.

My current search page consists of two searches. A last name search that has a single filed and a submit button and a full search that contains a few hundred possible criteria in several drop down lists.

Any thoughts?

Thanks,
Andrew

> I'm looking for something programmatic

I don't think the API will help you run a complicated search, but this can be coded in PHP/MySQL using CiviCRM's DAO inside of a Drupal module.

Agree with X, I would try the API first.....I would imagine it can actually give you all you need.