CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Advanced Search seems to search only for Contacts.  Not Participants.  Participant Search seems very limited.  I don't see how you can search on custom fields in either one.  It would be very important to be able to search on custom fields in Participants.  Including Individual custom fields and Participant custom fields.

But - the way it works is not helpful. I will give you an example. I have a custom field under Individual called "Translation Need" which is a choice of 10 radio buttons.  This is for events where we offer simultaneous translation in multiple languages.  For the translation team, I want to export a list of attendees of a specific event who need any kind of translation. I can't. As far as I can see, Advanced Search supports only Custom Field = Specific Value.  It does not support "is not null."  I see that Search Builder supports that, but Search Builder is still opaque to me.  I don't know if it's buggy or if I just don't understand it.  Advanced Search is nice.  But couldn't we add "not =" and "field is null" and "field is not null" and < and > to Advanced Search?

What I am used to is Regonline, where I can not only select as requested above for a custom report, but I can generate a link to the custom report and send that to the Translation team so they can run their report or download their data with no training, no usability issues, no security worries.