CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I'm building a site for a woman who runs activities for young children (5-10), and I've run into some difficulties applying some basic CiviCRM assumptions to this project.  I'd be interested in feedback from this forum.

At first, I planned to have each parent and child represented as a separate civi contact, assigning relationships between them.  This was a problem because I want users (ie, parents) to be able to create corresponding Drupal accounts and keep their own contact information up-to-date.  Since email addresses have to be unique for Drupal users, and five-year-olds clearly don't have their own email addresses, I had to stop creating contacts for children and instead add their names to their parent's records using custom data fields.  There are hacks to allow duplicate email addresses in Drupal, but these don't work with CiviCRM.  Also, since these children don't always live with the parent who enrolls them, I also had to create custom fields to optionally enter other street addresses for them.

This is working fine.  However, I'm not sure how to apply this model to online registration for events.  I need some way to say which child belonging to a given parent is registering for which upcoming events, and I can't think of anything other than a series of custom data fields per child, with names like 'attending event on (date)?'

There must be another way to do this; your suggestions are welcome.

I realize the children can be entered into CiviCRM as contacts with email addresses, but I would like parents to be able to update their children's contact information via Drupal (since they often live at a different address), which as I understand it would have required a separate Drupal account per CiviCRM contact.  Otherwise, I'd have to find a way to allow Drupal users to edit profiles of contacts which are related to them, and not just their own data.  I could write something like this with CiviNode, but this would have to give Drupal users the ability to create and delete contacts to keep information about their family up-to-date, so it wouldn't be trivial.

I didn't realize it was possible to make a custom data group for event participants, that's quite helpful.  Now my online registration form includes a profile which asks if child1, child2, etc. are attending the event in question.  (I'll try to hack that to replace those terms with the actual children's names.)  Is it possible to give Drupal users the ability to change this data for events they've already registered for (or, for that matter, to update their status to indicate they're no longer attending an event)?

Also, I've just tried registering online for an event a second time as a user logged into Drupal; I expected my answers to the custom participant fields to be updated, but instead the user is shown twice in the list of participants.  Is this intentional?  I was expecting the duplicate matching rules to catch this (especially since I was logged in as the same Drupal user).

I was editing my last comment while you were posting yours  so I'll repeat what I said above: I've just tried registering online for an event a second time as a user logged into Drupal; I expected my answers to the custom participant fields to be updated, but instead the user is shown twice in the list of participants.  Is this intentional?  I was expecting the duplicate matching rules to catch this (at least when logged in as the same Drupal user).

Thanks for the link to the Kabissa project; that does look relevant, and I'll keep that in mind for the future.

I likely don't have time on this particular deadline to implement proper "modify my event registration" but I'll try to at least write code to display the user's values for custom participant fields under the event's listing in the dashboard view, which shouldn't be too hard.  If I get a chance I'll speak up in IRC when I have something to show.

I posted a new thread, but actually it is related. Why isn't the email address from the current user picked up in events?

So I should copy the email address I want to use into a billing address field?