CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

In 4.3, the option to choose Start/end dates for relationships when doing an advanced search is a improvement, but for my use it doesn't go far enough. 

I regularly need to supply names and addresses of contacts who have a particular relationship that either started between two specified dates or that ended between two specified dates.

To do this easily I need two separate date selection options:

• Start Date where I can set From and To dates
• End date where I can set From and To dates.

I am a novice to code changes, but eager to learn.  Does this seem like something a novice could do and something that might be useful to others? 

I thought the existing advanced search code for relationships date selection and perhaps that for the Memberships date selections of Member since, Start date and End date might give me a good start.

If so, can someone point me to where I will find that?

Two thoughts about this:

1) Having more exact control with a separate field for "start date" and "end date" would be useful for some searches.

2) Having it the way it is now might be more useful for most searches.

The way (I think) most organizations use relationship start-end dates is fairly imprecise, and CIvi encourages this - because start and end dates are optional, and "disabled" relationships are lumped together with those with a past end date. So this single date range search criteria sort of fudges it all together to give people the results (I think) they expect - "give me all relationships that happened during this timeframe" it will return all relationships that:
- Started during that timeframe but have no end date
- Ended during that timeframe but have no start date
- Started and ended during that timeframe

If you put your mind to it you could probably design something better, and the first steps don't involve any code. You just have to think through all the scenarios - both in terms of what type of data might be in the database, and what types of searches people would want to perform on it. Let us know what you come up with.