CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Further point:
I've seen discussions of signing up Participant + guest as a single registration, but this isn't what is wanted here. There is a need to have a Contact record for each participant and also to have custom fields per participant for dietary & access needs etc. Of course if the member organisation had CiviCRM admin access, they could create the Contact records and register them; but they don't (and shouldn't) have such access. Another approach would be to email the participants, ask them to create logins & register themselves, but this isn't the way the member orgs want to do it. The logged-out behaviour is just what's wanted.

Thanks for the reply, Lobo. Your comments on guests sound promising.

Re: "I think basing the behavior on same / different email address is kinda hackish":

That's not how I see it, from a user perspective. It's a registration form with an email field. The behaviour I would expect is that the person whose email address I enter in that form, gets registered for the event. I'm happy for the form to be pre-filled with my email address if I am logged in. I am not happy that if I enter a different address in the form, my contact record gets updated with this different address. This is a registration form, not a contact edit form. I was bemused when I first tried this out and found that my event had a participant called Janet Demouser (presumably a rodent control operative) who bizarrely had my email address.

So I don't see it as a case of basing the behavior on same / different email address. The behaviour is always (regardless of whether logged in): register the contact who has the email address entered; if no such contact exists, create one.

If the assumption has already been made in the code, by the time the registration form is drawn, that the person we want to register is the logged-in user, then I can see your point about "basing the behavior on same / different email address". But what if we don't make that assumption and instead, as in the not-logged-in case, wait to see what email address gets entered in the registration form and then retrieve/create a contact based on that? (There may be very good reasons why not for all I know, I'm just floating the question. )

If there isn't general support for this change, I'll try to customise our installation as I don't think the member orgs will remember or understand that  they have to log out to register people. ["It says I've already registered and one of the delegates has just told me they've been getting email from CiviCRM..."] Am I entering a world of pain here? From a quick look, setDefaultValues in Event/Form/Registration/Registration.php seems like a promising place to start - if I were to comment out the if ( $contactID ) clause there, would I break things in inscrutable ways?

The guest stuff could be very useful further down the line but for now, they want something working in the next week or two.

Thanks again,

Dave

Thanks for the further reply, Lobo. I completely understand that if we want changes on a short timescale, or changes that aren't of general use, then it's up to us (er, me) to implement them.

Just had a meeting with the client (umbrella group). Good news: they've become more relaxed about the timescale. Bad news: they want a member org to be able to register multiple participants with a single email address. I.e. the org may have only one email - info@my.org - and they want to register several participants who do not have their own email addresses. Could this use case be covered with the member + guests approach?

Thanks again,

Dave