CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I have created a custom search that lists parents of children in certain groups/classrooms/grades.  There is one row for each parent, which also lists the name of the child and other basic info.  The search itself works in so far as it displays the correct records.   However, if I choose the action "Create PDF Letter" then I only get one letter per parent, not one letter per row.

For example, I run the custom search and see the results listing  25 rows. However, I only get 15 PDF letters.  The "missing" letters are for individuals who are listed in multiple rows due to the fact they have more than one child. ( which is a very common situation.)

My current work-around is to have the end-user export the results to Excel, then do a mail-merge in Excel. The export produces 25 rows as expected.

What I was trying to do: Create a new custom action using hooks, to use instead of Create PDF Letter and Send Email. However, this is not working as the custom action simply gets an array of 15 contact IDs. I was thinking I could pass another id other than contact id (such as relationship id, or parent contact id concated with the child's contact id, etc.)   But the custom action and the build-in actions always seem to expect contact IDs.

Any ideas on the best way to tackle this issue? Seems like it would come up anytime there is a contact listed multiple times in the resulting rows.

BTW: I am also using some custom mail merge tokens, such as {parent_name}  and {child_name}  in the PDF Letter/email to produce a letter as follows:
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Dear George Jetson,

Your child, Elroy Jetson has a parent-teacher conference  next week. We look forward to seeing you.

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Dear George Jetson,

Your child, Judy Jetson has a parent-teacher conference  next week. We look forward to seeing you.

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So a closely related problem is the custom token needs to know which row someone was on so it can get the details for the correct child.  This is failing too, as the hook for mail merge tokens only includes an array of contact ids for the parents.