CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

API help needed

I am trying to write an API that updates or creates custom address data (it uses the postcode from the address data to do a postcode lookup against another database to find the local authority and stores the result in the custom data field I have created in civi). The first bit is fine. The problem is inserting this into the civi custom data.

(This will update a joomla installation)

The code I *think* I want is from the examples folder (CustomValueCreate):

require_once '/home/persorgu/public_html/administrator/components/com_civicrm/civicrm.settings.php';
require_once 'CRM/Core/Config.php';
$config = CRM_Core_Config::singleton( );

function custom_value_create_example(){
$params = array(
  'custom_1' => 'customString',
  'version' => 3,
  'entity_id' => 1,
);

  require_once 'api/api.php';
  $result = civicrm_api( 'custom_value','create',$params );

  return $result;
}


$updatecustomdata=function custom_value_create_example();




I'm confused cos I cannot figure out where to substitute my data in the code above to make it work:.

e.g the data I have is $local_authority which is the data I want to insert and $address_id which is the corresponding addressid from the addresses table in civi.

the id for my custom data set in civi (called data derived from postcode) is 6

the name of the table (according to phpmyadmin) is civicrm_value_data_derived_from_postcode__6

the name of the field I want to update in the above table is called local_authority_18,  (in civi it is called Local Authority, id=18)

Any help on how to update thee above code with the required values gratefully received.

Thank you for the pointers Erik, It's looking better now.

The resources you poit me to are great. I would like to play with the api explorer but cannot find it at the location mentioned at http://book.civicrm.org/developer/current/techniques/api/

Is the API explorer only for Drupal? - Mine is a Joomla install.

Dave