CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I am confused about why a Smart Group is not found as a Group in the individual contact record tab Groups.  I am not sure where to put this so please let me know if I should be posting elsewhere.

We are using a Custom Field to manage a dropdown list of committee names.  This drop down is included in a profile that is used in an Event that we intend to use to sign up volunteers for our annual festival so that they can choose a committee to volunteer into.  We then set up Smart Group for each committee to look at the Custom Field and smart group the contact into that group with the intent to have a Group that represents the committee they chose, and also to be able to move them from committee to committee easily.

Everything appears to work properly.  The contact chooses a Custom Field and is automatically moved into the Smart Group. 

I am confused because when I list the contact from a search, the Groups tab says 0 and clicking Groups indicates that the contact does not belong to any groups.  Further, viewing the Groups tab does give the opportunity to assign the user to a dropdown list of Groups that is comprised of both Smart Groups and standard Groups.  I can assign the contact to a Smart Group from that tab.  The display of Groups increments and the person is added to the Smart Group as I would have expected when smart grouped into the original Smart Group by use of Custom Field criteria.  Further, now they are listed both in the Groups tab as one committee, and under the Custom Field drop down under the Contact record and therefore in the original Smart Group as well.

Can someone please explain why Smart Groups are not listed as Groups under the Groups tab in the Contact record?  Why, if a smart group process moves a Contact into a Smart Group does the Contact not show up under the Contact Groups tab unless they are manually added to a group?

Is there a better strategy for accomplishing this task?

Thank you very much for any pointers you can offer. 

Rob

Thank you!!!  You just made my night.

Lobo -

Testing with Beta 2. 

Smart group set to grab contacts for which a custom tag is set to X do NOT appear in the Groups count on the Groups tab. 

In the editor for the contact, Tags and Groups are not selected for groups where that contact is a smart grouped member.

To clarify, if I have a smart group set up to populate for contacts that have a custom field set to X, they do appear under the Groups tab as being a member of that group, but the Groups tag count does NOT increment.  Not a big deal, but FYI.

I don't know how tans and groups are suposed to work, but if a smart group criteria which places the user into a group should probably also set the Tags and Groups editor check boxes accordingly.  At least in my mind, the check box should be checked, but with some other sort of check mark that indicates a smart group designated grouping.

Further, there is a warning that This contact does not currently belong to any groups.

Loving this product!  Thank you for all your hard work.

Hi - pls check if it is working in Demo site.

Smart group changes are cached and updated periodically (I think every 5 minutes - ish), which may be why you didn't see them on the demo. Your Bachman test is definitely showing up now (screenshot attached) - http://wordpress.demo.civicrm.org/wp-admin/admin.php?page=CiviCRM&q=civicrm/contact/view&reset=1&cid=130

Sandra - Agreed that it would be best if the smart groups were included in the count on the Groups tab. However we haven't figured out a way to do that w/o adding too much overhead to the loading of the contact pages. The queries to retrieve smart groups are quite 'expensive' - which is why they are displayed in a separate 'pane' and only loading when the user clicks on the pane (i.e only when the user has asked to see them). This means that the 'count' is not available until that action is taken.

If you / your organization has resources to help figure out if there's a better way to do this that doesn't cause problems for sites w/ large datasets - that would be most welcome.