CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi all, a question about custom fields and searching..

Is there a way to have the title of the custom field be the searchable text, not the text entered into the custom field?

For example, say we have a custom field for Organizations - answers to which could be Sierra Club, or Audubon, or whatever (there could be any number of answers here). Is there a way to search for "Organizations", and have all the results come up.. rather than searching for Sierra Club or Audubon? As there could be any number of answers for the Organziations field, it makes no sense to me have to search for the answer, not the question.

On a second reading - I think maybe what you want is to use the Search Builder to search for "Organizations is NOT NULL" - let me know if I'm on the right track!

Correct.  The quick search is for name/e-mail only, though you can add a handful of other fields under the Administer menu -> Customize Data and Screens -> Search Preferences.

Almost any search that's intended to find multiple records should be through Search Builder or Advanced Search!

Full-text searches are cumbersome on the server, and are really for a last resort!

The Search Preferences are probably available in Civi 3, under a different submenu of the Administer menu.  But you should definitely upgrade to Civi 4, because most of us don't have Civi 3 running so it's very difficult to get support!

Jon