CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

We've imported a number of policy issues as custom data options, and are seeing some strangeness in their behaviour in the system when trying to edit the multiple choice options. Some of the behaviours observed include:

 * On saving a multi-choice option, CiviCRM may refuse to save details when no changes were made in the form, stating that there are already existing fields with the same value/label. (See attached image Picture 66.png)
 * On saving a multi-choice option, CiviCRM may fail to save the details and fail to give any error. This happened for me when I deactivated the "default" option on a field which was showing "default".
 * CiviCRM sometimes shows a multi-choice option as "default" when the entry in the database has is_default = NULL or 0. (So far I've only seen it display one option as default, when there were 20 with is_default = 0 and 86 with is_default IS NULL.)

I'm debugging this currently in the hope that I can shed more light on it. I'd appreciate any suggestions that other users can offer.

It seems like the problems were introduced when the custom data entries were edited using several tabs at once. Once that had happened, the custom data settings were a bit messed up and it became difficult to fix it through the UI, requiring some DB changes to restore the correct setup.

Some banking sites use (highly annoying) JavaScript to prevent the use of tabs etc. While it's horrid, this would at least prevent anyone else getting into the same situation. Is it worth considering something like this? If multiple tabs are a no-no for CiviCRM, then would we perhaps be better off annoying the folks who use them with warnings rather than risking them messing up their data?

I think CRM-2876 is particularly gruesome because there is no error displayed - generally the data is saved, but to the wrong record (whether it's a custom data option or a contact's address). Very much looking forward to this one being fixed.