CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi CiviCRMers!

I've encountered a bizarre problem that is causing me much frustration. First some context of what I'm trying to accomplish, because maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree:

I'm working on a CiviCRM implementation for a political organization so we can keep track of our membership, contributions, etc. Pretty plain vanilla stuff. Not using events or mail or anything.

As part of trying to set this up, I need to be able to give a controlled level of access to members of our Executive Board. I've read the wiki section on Access Control (http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC41/Access+Control+Context+and+Overview), and am trying to proceed through the directions. I successfully created a group called 'Eboard', but when I attempt to add a contact to the group, I get the following error:

Sorry. A non-recoverable error has occurred.
DB Error: constraint violation
Return to home page.

As you can see, the error doesn't give me much in the way of specifics. I'm not sure if I'm doing something wrong (find user, go to 'Groups' tab, select 'Eboard' and click 'Add'), or if I configured the group wrong, or...? Maybe there's a permissions problem in my database?

The details of my install:
Joomla: 2.5.4
PHP: 5.3.13
MySQL: Server Version 5.1.56-log; Web Server Client Version 5.1.49

I'm not exactly a newbie, nor am I a pro when it comes to wrangling php/MySQL/CiviCRM. Let's say I know enough to get myself into trouble, and sometimes I'm lucky enough to get myself out. This isn't one of those times. 

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

I am willing to consider other approaches, too... such as doing all my access control through Joomla, but I would prefer to do it through CiviCRM, as it seems to allow more granular control.

Thanks!
Chris (digitalzen)

Haven't tried creating or adding to other groups. That's a great thought! I'll experiment with it tomorrow and report back.