CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hello all,

Background:  I am experienced with PHP/MySQL development, in addition to some Drupal work (for what it's worth.)
I'm fairly new to CiviCRM, but I've just inherited a fairly large website which is running CiviCRM 1.4, which now needs some changes.  The site is running on PHP5 and MySQL5, and an older version of Drupal (either 4.6 or 4.7.)

Problem: We need the "export" feature from the contact search results page to include fields from contact relationships. Specifically, if I am exporting individuals who are "employees of" an organization contact, I need certain fields from the related organization to appear in the individual drop down box and export along with the individual fields.

Example: Suppose a user "John Smith" is an "employee of" "Blacksmiths, Inc."  When I select "John Smith" from the search results page and choose "Export" and "Select fields to export," some of the available fields should be "Organization Name" and "Organization Address."  When I do finally export the contacts as a CSV, there should be one row, perhaps something like

"Smith","John","123 Home St","Blacksmiths, Inc.","456 Work Ave"

Solutions: This is where I need help.  What is the right approach to incorporate this functionality? Is there a CiviCRM plugin or module architecture I should be using to write a modification that provides this functionality?  Or should I just write my own little script that looks at the database independently and exports a report of what we need internally?  Should I just hack away at the core, and try to shoehorn in some organization fields in the individual contact type? (The latter is what I've been trying to do for a few hours now, but have, for the moment, abandoned.)

I'm fine with any approach, I just don't know what will be the easiest at this point in time. (Time is critical. Isn't it always, though?) What do you all think?

Any advice or guidance on how to proceed would be appreciated greatly!  Thanks in advance for helping out a total noob.

On the 2.0, you have a custom export function, and one of the preset ones (and the example given in the doc) allows you to export the employer (ie the organisation that has a employer relationship with the contact).

I don't know how difficult it would be to upgrade, but having a old version means you'll be pretty much on your own if you have to maintain it, as the rest of the community has moved to something more recent.

Of course, if your export is to migrate to another CRM, that's not an issue.

Good luck

X+

I've fixed the documentation to eliminate all references to Drupa 4.x

lobo