CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I wanted to find a way to deliver this without editing any of the core code, just to add code to the customised report template itself. I've come up with a way of doing this, but I want to check that it doesn't do any serious damage to the logic of CiviCRM.

The process, as I understand it, is that custom data is added to the $this->_columns array by addCustomDataToColumns() from the CRM/Report/Form.php, which happens when form is built (triggered by the CRM_Report_Form __construct() function, itself triggered by the __construct() function in the specific class created by the report template). Later customDataFrom() turns the columns into a SQL 'from' clause, and this happens when the form is submitted, triggered by buildQuery() from the specific class for the report template.

What I've done is add a few lines in the postProcess() function within my report, before the call to $this->buildQuery() so that the column for the relevant item of custom data is re-defined as extending not the default 'civicrm_contact' table but an aliased version of the table which supplies the identity of the related contact, which I'm calling 'civicrm_relation'. This aliased version has already been defined in $this->_columns and has an appropriate left join already written in to the $this->_from string.

  function postProcess() {

    $this->beginPostProcess();

    $this->checkEnabledFields();

// Over-ride the custom data 'extends' relationship so that the GP surgery data is referenced to the 'relation' not the 'contact'
    if ($this->_columns['civicrm_value_gp_surgery_data_13']['extends'] == "Organization") {
      $this->_columns['civicrm_value_gp_surgery_data_13']['extends'] = "Relation";
      CRM_Core_BAO_CustomQuery::$extendsMap['Relation'] = 'civicrm_relation';
    }
   
    $this->buildQuery(TRUE);
... and so on

If the user asks the report to include custom data from the gp_surgery_data_13 table, such data only makes sense in the context of the related surgery, not the patient themselves. So this edit seems safe to me, in the context of this specific report, but it's an approach which wouldn't work if the same custom data might be needed relative to both the subject of the report and the related contact. But that's a stretch further than our use case.

So, does this look like a suitable solution? Is it useful? Dangerous?

Thanks, Deepak, and yes, that's exactly what's changing in the SQL.