CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I have managed to import data into Civi 4.4.3 successfully. I imported 'Interest Areas' (e.g. Health, Education) into a Custom field (text). Just as plain text e.g. "Health Education Outdoors". Each word is a separate Interest Area.

Now I want to build Groups of all those interested in 'Health', all those interested in 'Education' etc. I thought I'd be able to Search for all the contacts/members who had the particular word in that field and then 'Add to Group'. A bit like using an 'includes' or 'like' rule on a database search.

I've tried Advanced Search but it only selects those records where it is the only word in that custom field, i.e. it only selects when the field value is 'Health', it doesn't select when it's 'Health Outdoors'. I tried a Full-text Search which found the records okay but there wasn't any way to 'Add to Group' > 'Health'.

Is there a way to do this or do I need to think about getting dirty with MySQL, and is that even possible in this case?

Or do I do multiple contact imports, filtering them in Excel first and then adding them to a different group with each import?

Thanks in advance.

 

hi keith - can you confirm that if you search using the wildcard you still don't get the results you want - ie search for %health%
my expectation in a text field is that %health% should return xhealth healthx xhealthx x health x etc

nice when it does turn out to be something simple