CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

 I am fairly new to CiviCRM and thus don't know the intricacies of the code all that well.  Some very basic programming theory with reference to combining attributes of different components of CiviCRM.  We are holding a fundraising event in which participants are rated by skill level and donation (sponsorships in this instance) amount.  The overall rating is determined by a simple math equation that places various weights on the different attributes.  For keeping up with who has donated what in the most dynamic fashion I have determined two approaches.  The first would be to automatically register participants into a separate group and track donation amounts to their name for a set period of time.  The problem with this approach is that it forces the participant to do the donations for the sponsor (which some sponsors may not be comfortable with).  The second option would be to force (maybe through code modification of emails or the event itself) participants to create their own contribution pages.  This solves the issue with sponsors but would require much more intuitive programming and work to set up.  Brief description but I was curious what the more experienced users thought of the most dynamic and efficient approach to this circumstance is?

That is what I meant by the second approach.  As you know the more you require someone to do the less likely they are to do it "out of their giving nature".  So I would think that this would have to be automatically set up (without further input from the user) upon event registration.  Which is partly my question for you more experienced users.  What would be the most efficient way to pass along information to the separate Contribution section of API from the Event section short of hard-coding the information to be sent piece by piece to a new entry in the SQL database?

I do see that the information is readily available because it is displayed on the top donors report, so maybe a third option is to just post that exact query call that it is making and modify it to include matching donations on behalf of the matching person, but then we run into problems with mispelled names