How to handle invitations ? (ie participant with a "pending' status)

[xavier]

Hi,

For one event, I have a list of participant contacts. I wanted to offer them a simple interface so they could confirm their attendance.

The goal is to have this guest list, with the status (still pending+ the guy hasn't confirmed/declined, confirmed...)

I added the contacts to the event with a status pending (the closest I found for invited). I thought that going on the registration form:

/civicrm/event/register?id=XX&reset=1

and registering would change my status.

Unfortunately, I get that message:

"Oops. It looks like you are already registered for this event. If you want to change your registration, or you feel that you've gotten this message in error, please contact the site administrator."

(this is the same message, no matter the status, eg canceled)

Is there a way to let the participant changing the status of his participation ?

X+

[Dave Greenberg]

Not sure if this might work if you created a new participant status "Invited". OR  this MIGHT work in 2.1 where you can define which event statuses are "counted"??

However, might make more sense to put your invited participants in a group and limit access to the event registration page via ACL ??

At some point an explicit Invite >> RSVP workflow probably would be useful - but it's not on the short term roadmap.

[xavier]

And is there any way/urls to change the status of a participation directly for the participant ?

X+

[Dave Greenberg]

Not that I'm aware of. \

Wondering whether the best approach might be to create a small Drupal module (civicrm_participant_rsvp) which takes GET params from a URL (event+participant ID's + maybe a hash - if you need it to work for anonymous...) and uses CiviCRM API's / BAOs to retrieve the person's current participant status and (a subset of?) available statuses. You present these as a radio button set in a form and let them select whether they're attending or not.

I suspect other folks would find something like  this useful if it was made available - the "problem" of an RSVP style work-flow has come up a number of times :-)

[xavier]

Looks like a smart option (actually, probably a subset only of status, I don't want them to see we have a status "shit, he's coming"

Any reason to do it as a drupal module rather than in civi directly ?

(ie. this feature is in the self-service family, like to the unsubscribe on a mailing or profile edit)

X+

[Dave Greenberg]

If you're comfortable with coding this up as a contribution to the core codebase - I do think it would be useful to others. I would then suggest writing up some details about your implementation plan and reviewing them w/ Lobo or Kurund over IRC.

One "heads-up" - given that 2.1 is pretty far along in the release cycle - it's likely that your code wouldn't be added to our distribution until 2.2.

[jamien-www.compucorp.co.uk]

Hey Xavier, Dave,

We have a client with a similar requirement to this where they would like to be able to "invite" contacts to an event and then allow them to confirm their attendance. I was wondering if a solution/workflow was built for this? If theres some code flying about perhaps we can spruce it up and get it into an extension.

Best

Jamie

[jamien-www.compucorp.co.uk]

Aha - for anyone else looking some more info here: http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,18021.msg74962.html#msg74962