Author Topic: "add user" to smart groups?!?! (Read 2749 times)

zachofalltrades · May 14, 2007, 02:45:02 pm

I'm having trouble figuring out if this is a bug or a feature:

I have very recently set up civiCRM 1.6, with civiMember, civiMail, and civiContribute.

I am trying to get my head around the entities of organization/indivdiuals/groups

I have noticed that you can add a contact to a smart group -- but I thought that a smart group was supposed to be the result of a search/query. Is this a bug or a feature for some use case that I have not thought of?

related to this bug/feature I have found that when I look at a contact record on the 'groups' tab, I can only see groups that the user has been added to directly, including smart groups. If a user has been added to a smart group, then it will show up on this tab, but if the user has not been directly added to the smart group, then it does NOT show up on this tab, even though a search for the smart group will bring up this user. Surely this is a bug? Or do I still not 'get' something?

With all due respect, can someone please show me the light?

Dave Greenberg · May 14, 2007, 06:45:23 pm

Smart groups are "primarily" saved searches (queries). However, folks have come forward with numerous use cases where it was useful to explicitly ADD or REMOVE a contact from a Smart Group - "everyone who lives in New York AND Jane Doe - who is currently living in Amsterdam". Also, explicit REMOVE is needed to support cases where Smart Groups are used for Mailings - and folks want to unsubscribe.

The "behavior" of not showing Smart Group memberships in the Groups tab for a contact is "an optimization" (euphemism for we haven't yet figured out a way to do this w/o too "expensive" querying).

zachofalltrades · May 14, 2007, 09:32:44 pm

OK, I get that there are some cases where you would want to add or remove a user that would other (not) show up in a group that is a saved search.

It seems to me, though, that the waters could be clarified by:

1. not listing groups and smart groups together in a single drop down as if they were the same type of collection
2. somehow distinguishing users that have been explicitly added to a group
3. providing some way to see that there are contacts that met the search criteria, but have been explicity removed

zachofalltrades · May 14, 2007, 09:36:04 pm

OK, I should have played with it some more before that last post...

I see that there is a "Find Members within this group" feature, and this offers three check boxes for "added", "removed", and "pending".

This meets item number three above (find members that have been removed), but number two (distinguish members that have been added) just bring back the entire list.

Dave Greenberg · May 15, 2007, 02:55:55 pm

There's undoubtedly room for some improvement here, but...
- smart groups are labeled as such in the Manage Groups listings
- members who have been explicitly added are supposed to be differentiated in the Manage Groups >> Members listings in the "Status" column ("Added" vs. "Smart"). However there is no search criteria to separate these as of yet

While playing with this - I think I discovered a possible bug in the "explicit add" functionality. I created a smart group - all contacts in "Alabama" and then explicitly added another contact to this group. They are not showing up in the Manage Groups >> Members list. I've entered this in our bug tracker as CRM-1907

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Author Topic: "add user" to smart groups?!?! (Read 2749 times)

zachofalltrades

"add user" to smart groups?!?!

Dave Greenberg

Re: "add user" to smart groups?!?!

zachofalltrades

Re: "add user" to smart groups?!?!

zachofalltrades

Re: "add user" to smart groups?!?!

Dave Greenberg

Re: "add user" to smart groups?!?!