CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Drupal's CCK provides a PHP code format to specify the "allowed values" list of a field using the 'select' widget. I have a site with a need for the same feature in CiviCRM.

The specific issue is that this site needs to limit access to events by group membership, meaning that each event needs to be labeled as being accessible and not accessible to certain group(s).

In our prototype implementation, the approach we are taking is to add custom select fields to CiviEvents, into which we manually the list of groups and their IDs. Custom code then examines those lists and examines the current user and then determines his eligibility to view or register for this event. This works, but obviously requires manual maintenance of these select options.

The ideal would be a system like CCK's, wherein a few lines of PHP code could generate the option list. Barring that, I think that we could also just leave the lists essentially empty, and then use a bit of jQuery to build the list of options--custom module code would provide the list of options to the jQuery code. This approach I think is simple and will work--as far as I can see, the values for such custom fields are stored as actual values in the DB, as opposed to pointers to a record in another table.

But I wanted to ask what people think about both ideas, i.e.:

 1. PHP code like CCK
 2. jQuery to build the list

I am asking the merits of these ideas, and the feasibility of implementing #1, and if anyone else has interest in such a feature.

How do you like that? I just today reviewed the hooks page, looking into how to retrieve a custom field value for a given entity (didn't find a way BTW) and I saw that hook and glossed over it. NOW I want it for this.

Thanks.