CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi all,
I'm a Civi User, with no IT training and little experience. We're trying to better understand Search builder, so that we can be sure our data export process isn't losing important data.

When one contact has multiple activities of the same type, how does Search Builder determine which activity to report?

What we're doing:
We have used Search Builder to query all contacts where activity type =41, OR where other custom fields in the activity 41 fieldset are not null. (The OR search was included so that these fields would be included in the search results)

Many of the contacts we queried have 2-5 activities, all of type 41. In the search results, data from only one of those activities appears to be present. The "sub-fields" reported by this search (those included by using the OR search) are not consistent. (Some are null, some contain currency values). It is unclear to us from the documentation how Civi determines which activity to report.

Thanks for your help understanding this better!
Chris

Though this DOES make me realize that "view results as" isn't an option on Search Builder.  While I realize you can work around this by running a search, saving the resulting contacts as a group, then doing an Advanced Search for that group and selecting "View Results As Activity", is there some reason I can't think of why "View Results As" shouldn't be added to Search Builder?

hi chris

key think to twig, which you may have already, is that if you are wanting to export Activities then you will potentially have multiple rows per contact - and you won't get this by doing an export of contacts