CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi everybody:

I need to develop a dashboard that shows the contact's count from some smart groups.
Through API, if I ask the rowCount for the group, the result is always 1.
I can query the complete list of contacts, and count the array rows in PHP; but this method is quite slow.
There's a way to run the smart group query direct to the DB. Surely this must be much faster.
Thanks in advance.

There's a table called "civicrm_group_contact_cache" which stores the list of contacts for smart groups. The table is cleared+rebuilt periodically (although I don't recall the exact rules off the top of my head). I believe you can call  CRM_Contact_BAO_GroupContactCache::check() to ensure that it's up-to-date. For more details on how that cache works, I'd recommend reading more code in CRM_Contact_BAO_GroupContactCache.

The GroupContactCache a relatively low-level service. In practice, I don't think it's changed much in the past few years, but in theory it could change in future releases. Regardless, whether one examines GroupContactCache directly or writes a bug-fix so that the API deals with it better, I think GroupContactCache is an important piece of the puzzle.

I will give a try to both methods