CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I am using CiviCRM to organize and track door-to-door canvassing.  Right now I use OOCalc to sort and print walk lists .  It would be nice if sorting contacts by address was an option so that I can print walk lists directly from the component.

I'm don't have much experience in this area, but I assume the "sorting by address" requires at a minimum storing the street name separately from the full address. We have the schema for this but no code has been implemented to do the parsing / storing / retrieving.

I suspect there are other issues like separating odd and even addresses, possibly incorporating geo-coding / coordinates, etc.

If this feature is important to you, a good start would be to spec out your requirements and the modifications needed to current CiviCRM behaviors in detail. You can post this here on the wiki:

http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/Voter+Management+and+Canvassing

... and then solicit feedback from the community. Finally, if you can gather some folks to help sponsor this functionality - that will help ensure it become part of the platform. You might want to search or "voter" and "canvass" on this forum to identify other folks who have interest in this area.

Thank you for the response.

In my opinion the minimum functionality is sorting a list of contacts by street number and this would actually be quite a powerful tool.  It's quite easy to work around the odd-even sorting.  Right now my contacts are in groups by street name so I don't need to sort street separate from house number.  I import contacts into each group using my initial source list which is a.csv file and so I can presort even-odd numbers before importing and mass tag the contacts as even or odd to allow searching on this tag.

Now of course the higher level functions you list like even-odd sort, geo-coding, as well as my dream of seeing an integrated survey design/response/data entry (maybe using profiles and custom data?) is the candy on the icing on the cake.

Unfortunately I have no coding skills so I don't know the work involved in adding an ascending-descending sort to the address column. All I can offer is my guess that sorting by address isn't much different than the ascending/descending sort by alphabet on contact names.  Is there a way to easily use the same code that sorts by name, city, state, zip, and phone #?

Regarding your other suggestions, I will move on this and see what happens.

If you are not familiar with PHP, you might first want to get started there and familiarize yourself with PHP and OOP (object oriented programming). The main site is: http://php.net/

You can also start reading the CiviCRM architecture series at: http://civicrm.org/architecture/

lobo

Given that some folks are interested in BOTH canvassing and voter management, while others like Troy are just interested in Canvassing - I kept the 2 separate stub pages, but moved them both under a "Voter Management and Canvassing" parent page.

This will enable basic sorting by address:

/com_civicrm/admin/civicrm/CRM/Contact/Selector.php

Replace Line 695 with

array(
                  'name'       => ts('Address'),
                  'sort'       => 'street_address',
                  'direction' => CRM_Utils_Sort::ASCENDING,
                  ),