CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi

Trying to use the API, but having a few problems, reported here in case (a) it's useful to devs (b) it's useful to others in the community trying to use it like I am. This post refers to CiviCRM 4.1.2

1. Bugs in (otherwise brilliant tool) API explorer

It generates invalid Smarty. e.g. return.somegroup:some_field="1" will never work as a smarty parameter; you must go dig up the custom field id and submit return_custom_NN instead. (Also worth note that the groupname:fieldname format doesn't work for Contact get.)

It generates invalid PHP
$results=civicrm_api("Contact","get", array (version=3','sequential' =>'0','contact_id' =>'1'));


2. Requesting custom data via Contact get request only ever returns one result for the custom field

This might be designed behaviour for some reason, but it is not in the documentation http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC40/CiviCRM+Public+APIs and I'm not clear how it picks one.


3. Data from CustomValue get is difficult to work with - please confirm I'm doing the right thing

Requesting a particular custom field (which may exist multiple times) returns and object with a values key pointing to an array. With sequential set, you can then reference the first (only) element of this array at 0. But the object inside there looks like this:

{
      "entity_id":"1",
      "latest":"Bam Bam",
      "id":"2",
      "308":"Pebbles Flintstone",
      "309":"Bam Bam"
   }

Now assuming you wanted the values (Pebbles Flintstone and Bam Bam)  you have to somehow filter the keys/props of this array/object for numeric values (or more precisely, strings that only contain numbers). Or unset (PHP) / delete (javascript) the entity_id, latest and id fields, before enumeration. The latter is more efficient, but then if a later version of CiviCRM introduces other output it will start showing up to users as data. Also - there seems to be no way to either match on regex or delete (unassign) vars in Smarty(!).

This post: http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,21844.msg94159.html#msg94159 suggests the values are available in a different format (might be relevant for 1 or Zero case?).

1. v. handy - could that be documented somewhere?

2. got it. Again, could it be documented?

3. yeah, it's taken me a long time to find a fix for this. Ended up writing a new Smarty plugin function - i.e. doing the job in PHP, wrapping it in Smarty. I'm much happier in PHP anyway. In terms of a suggestion for development, I would think that you either need a structure like:

{ entity_id: 123, latest: 'fred', values: { 321=>"fred", 987=>"barney" } }
i.e. put all the values in their own sub-object, so they can be easily enumerated.

OR (easier to bolt-on and backwards compatible, but inefficient)
{ entity_id: 123, latest: 'fred', keys: [321,987],  321=>"fred", 987=>"barney" }
i.e. list the keys so the values can be enumerated.

Here you go
http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC41/Using+Custom+Data+with+the+API

pls feel free to correct/add-to/fill out. Also I didn't want to remove it, but on that page there's a load of stuff from 2008 that isn't relevant to API v3. Someone with more authority should probably remove/clean that up.