CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

This is my first venture into hooking some new functionality into CiviCRM, so please feel free to redirect me where I need to go.

BACKGROUND:
I'm using the Activities core component as a way of tracking student extra-curricular involvement. Teachers will track their students by five categories (Activity Types). The students are awarded 'points' for their participation in a particular activity. Points are captured using a Custom Data field related to each Activity Type.

In order for students to win an award in a particular category. They need to have achieved a certain total number of points within a particular category. Example: Billy won an Academic Award because his total number of points in Academic activities is equal to 170 points.

TASK:
- Add up the POINTS (custom data) for each Activity Type, and post the total to an ACTIVITY TYPE TOTAL (custom data) field that is searchable.

I have all of the fields created that are needed to capture individual points per activity, as well as the place-holder custom data fields for storing the TOTALS for each Activity Type (which are searchable of course) - I just need to know what the best method is to add up and shuttle the data from one point to the other.

I appreciate any help or light that can be shed on the subject. Thank you very much.

Some great ideas here! There's also a need for students to be able to login and see their activity category totals. Its also preferable that teachers can easily search by range- a custom profile field that captures their category totals seemed like the best way to go.

2.  Option #2 seemed like the best route to take before I posted here. Issuing a hook that performed the calculation and modified the appropriate TOTALS field upon write seemed like the way to go - especially considering there's maybe only 1400 students total. It doesn't seem like it would cause any serious performance problems if a teacher entered 15 people for one activity (say, a sports team).

3. Option #3 interested me quite a bit. Would this be similar to a cron job that would execute based on time? Or would this be a procedure that executed as part of an action within CiviCRM.

There's also a concern that I don't wish to modify the core too much, so it doesn't create any issues for me when upgrading them to later versions of Drupal/CiviCRM. Based on these requirements, would you lean more towards option 2 or 3?

Thank you so much.

Separately - we are interested in hearing more about CiviCRM implementations in school settings. Please take a few minutes to add a brief description of your project on the CiviCRM Showcase board:

http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/board,4.0.html

thx!

you might want to contact web access india ltd to help you out. they are on http://civicrm.org/professional/

note that the civicrm dev team in india is based at web access, so as a disclaimer we do have a professional and financial relationship with them. please do your due diligence

lobo