CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi,

I am building a contacts and contributions tracking system for an organisation that has a very extensive set of categories used to classify and track donations that are received.

They have over 100 categories, which are organised hierarchically. You can imagine that the categories go something like: 'Budget 2008', which then breaks down into 'Events' and 'Direct appeals'. 'Events' then breaks down into 'November Bake Sale' and 'Marathon', etc.

I could just use a text input box for tracking these categories, but since the list is relatively static (corresponding to categories that appear in the organisation's annual budget) it would be nicer to have drop-down select lists. But the Custom Fields system only allows for a flat list of categories, which is less than ideal because a drop-down select list with 50 or 100 items is not very user-friendly.

The ideal solution would be the sort of widget used by CiviCRM itself on the import field mapping screens and other places, where one select menu would have the top level category, then the subsequent box would show the next level in the hierarchy once the first box was filled in.

Are there any plans to include this sort of functionality in CiviCRM? I see that something similar has already been done with Countries/States/Counties, so I'm wondering if it wouldn't be possible to have a more generic hierarchical custom field type. I guess the functionality is similar to the sort of hierarchical structure possible with Drupal's taxonomy system.

I'd be willing to help with implementation if I can.

Thanks in advance,
-Ian Macdonald

Hi,

I've had a look at hierarchical tagging in the sandbox and it looks really good. However, in my case I'm looking to categorise contributions rather than contacts themselves. It looks like tags can only be applied to contacts, so the hierarchical tags don't really help me.

What I need, I guess, is a way to make a 'alphanumeric/select' custom field hierarchical in a similar way that xavier has made the tags hierarchical. Either that or a way of applying tags to contributions.

I can use a flat list at the moment, but I may be interested in doing some development work later on so that hierarchical categories can be applied to contributions.

Best wishes,
-Ian