CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I've got 107 riding assocations for the members of political party, their riding association is stored in a custom field that I populated via an import.

I've just manually created the first 5 smart groups based on the value in this field, and I'm thinking either there's a better way to do this, or an automated way to generate the smart groups [i want groups for both mailing list and acl functions]

It looks like each smart group is adding a new row to civicrm_group and I could write a little script to just add new rows based on the existing ones, but I wonder if i also need some new rows in other tables, or whether those would be auto-generated if they don't exist...

So: what rows in what tables are required for a new smart group? [i'm using the search builder method to generate the smart groups manually].

Or: is this a bad plan due to the limitations of smart groups - e.g. should i instead convert these to regular groups [and ditch my custom field]?

While i'm at it - i'll want to generate some regional groupings of these groups (e.g. riding 1-20 make up the first region, etc.) and it looks like I can manually do this with smart groups as well - any short cuts or other ideas about that?