CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

So apparently I'm not finding the use of profiles intuitive.

Say I need to create a participant sign up form for an event - perhaps a 5K.  I gather this is the roll 'profiles' is to take. 

On my form, I need:

Name
Address
Phone
(aka. the usual contact info needed)

of course I'll also need

Gender
Participant type - run or walk
Time Class
Birthdate
Age
Age group
etc.

And to ensure clean data, I want drop downs or format checking on all of those fields. 

This is easy to do with WP Form tools (cforms, etc) - but I'm having difficulty wrapping my head around how to do so in Civicrm.  Can someone explain the basic workflow - apparently it's not by starting at the event management page...

Other questions that the above may answer - Does every event need it's own custom profile due each needing custom fields?  On the event management page, do you use multiple profiles each with the areas you need (add the name profile, the address profile, phone profile, the birthday/age profile, etc)  or do you create 1 large custom profile with all the needed info.  How do you ensure correct formatting on text fields (for b-day's and phone numbers for example)

Sorry if this is all very basic - just am not wrapping my head around the process civicrm is expecting for form creation.

in case it isn't obvious from the above - for fields like 'age class'
you need to
- create a Custom Field 'group of fields' and specify if they are to be used for eg Contacts (all types), or only Individuals, or for Participants (this would mean you could ask someone's flight arrival details and they could give a different answer for each conference without overriding their previous info)
- create the Custom Fields you need
- make or find an existing profile, and the select the fields you created above via the selector to 'expose' them in the profile so they will show if you use that profile for event registration etc
hth

you have it - yes sometimes the order seems counter intuitive - but indeed the fields need creating in the database first
then you can expose/push/pull/search data from them via profiles
and then you can display those profiles on pages via event or contribution pages

CiviCRM custom fields definitely need the concept of "computed" fields. So things like (for a contact)

Age, Total contributions, Last/First Contribution Amount and Date, This years contribition etc

Ideally the code for the computed fields could either be in a: trigger, stored procedure or PHP and Civi manages it

Would be great if we can find either developers or sponsors who can help make this happen. Do think it will take custom fields to the next level and be super powerful indeed

lobo