CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

In some code I'm writing, I'm trying to find a way to find contacts in the database based upon CustomValues.

For example, lets say I want to find all the contacts where a CustomValue "X" is equal to 10.

At the moment, I've solved the problem by code similar to below (this isn't my actual code, just an example of how I solved the problem. There may be typos):

$param = array('contact_type' => 'Individual', 'version' => 3,);
$results = civicrm_api( 'contact','get',$param );

foreach($results as $individual)
{

$cid = $individual['contact_id'];
$params = array('entity_id' => $cid, 'version' => 3, 'return.myCustomValue:x' => 1,);
$customValue = civicrm_api('custom_value', 'get', $params);
$x = $customValue['values'][<index of X>];

if($x == 10)
doSomething($cid);

}

However this seems a bit backwards to me. As I currently understand it, the above code performs at least N+1 queries to the database which doesn't seem very efficient when all I care about are contacts where X is equal to 10.

What seems would make the most sense, would be to pull all the entries where 'myCustomValue:x' is equal to 10. However from my understanding of the API is a contactID is required to get CustomValues, and CustomValues can only be pulled individually.

Essentially what I need seems to be the inverse of the CustomValue get API function. I don't have the contactID, but I have the CustomValue I'm searching for.

Is there a way to pull CustomValues without a specific contactID?