CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I have a custom field that is an "Autocomplete-Select" box and it's filtered by a specific group.  So the way I want the user to be able to use this is to type or select from the list a district or region they are involved with.  This field is fully functional for me the admin and anyone who is an administrator.  For everyone else, this field is unable to reference the group of districts/regions I have in place.  Let me explain the structure a little which may explain why this isn't working.  I added a new "Contact Type" using "Organization" as the base contact type and named it "District/Region".  I then created new Organizations of the type "District/Regions" such as "Pennsylvania", "VA, MD, DE", "Texas", "Central FL", and so forth.  Each District/Region (organization) is part of a custom group named "District/Region" and this is the group that I am filtering the "Autocomplete-Select" box with.  This is probably way too convoluted but my goal is to then build relationships with the members who are living in one of these districts to their current district coordinator responsible for that district/region.  Does this make any sense?  If there is an easier or better way, I would love to hear some ideas!!    Also, if someone can explain why all of this seems to work just fine for an admin, but not a regular user, that would be very helpful.

Thanks SO MUCH!

Kindly,
Rick Monyer

OK, thanks for that insight Dave!  I may just have to rethink this end of things and go at it a different way.  Is there a way to setup rules to automatically add people to specific groups based on a specific value in a custom field?

How about just creating a "smart group" (saved search) for each region. So folks just pick their region and that puts them in the associated smart group.

Dave, I like the idea and I started to implement it, but I have a question.  I figured out how to first of all create a Smart Group and I verified that when I look at all the contacts "associated" with that Smart Group it is correct.  But I was confused to learn that those contacts are not actually ADDED to that group if I were to open a contact and view their Current Groups.  So my question is how do I automatically add them to this Smart Group?  I also noticed when I view the contacts "in" this Smart Group, their Status is "Smart" unless I manually add them and then the Status becomes "Added".  NEVERMIND.    I answered my own question after trying it out a little more.  I verified that whether the contacts in the Smart Group are Smart or Added, they still are included in the queries for that group and I see no real benefit to automatically add a contact to a Smart Group if they are already associated with that Smart Group.  I realize this may make absolutely no sense unless you understand Smart Groups!