Hi everybody,
There have to be some of you who have experience with CiviCRM, right? If so, I am in some desperate need for local help!
I am currently working on finalizing the coding for a pretty big local project that uses CiviCRM to handle hundreds of events and event participants. Many of these events are intended for children, so the parent/guardian will be registering their child(ren) for various events. I have run into a problem that I have been afraid of for a while and have kind of hit a wall because of it. I would appreciate any help or suggestions you can give me!
The ideal outcome when a parent to registers a child for an event would be for the parent's information to be displayed, they enter the child's information, who is then registered for the event without changing the core info in the parent's profile. Ideally, there would be another contact created for the child, so the organization can track the children who have attended events by their profile data, such as age, school, grade, etc.
Currently When Parent 1 registers Child 1 for Event A, Parent 1's profile is afterwards modified to Child 1's information (primarily Individual:First Name and Individual:Last Name). Then, if Parent 1 registers Child 2 for an event (may be either the same event or a different one), the participant information for Event A is modified to Child 2. This is because whenever the profile that was selected in the event registration is submitted, it updates the user's profile.
Other considerations:
-If a custom field is used to accomplish this, then the event participant list displays the parents' information, not the children's
-Perhaps there is a way to change the event participant list to display the information I need. I found the menu item "Participant Listing Templates" in Administer > CiviEvent, but cannot find any documentation about how this is used.
I'm sorry if this is a little scattered, but I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around all of the aspects of this issue.
Has anyone had experience customizing CiviCRM in any similar ways? I would love to talk to you!
Best,
Alisa
Comments
Check dedupe
I had a similar problem -- see http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,14048.msg60090.html#msg60090
Check your settings at civicrm/contact/deduperules?reset=1
You get there from civicrm/admin/ under Manage, Find and Merge Duplicate Contacts.
Documentation:
http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC33/Find+and+Merge+Dupli...
and http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/Deduping+Contacts
The strict rule for individuals is email, so everyone with the same email address is considered one person. I plan to just remove email and go only with fuzzy -- First name, last name, and email, but I haven't done it yet.
I'm using CiviCRM for registration for the http://NCTech4Good.org conference, but my skills are very limited. For the June 2010 conference, the logistics people exported the data and did what they needed to do for lists and name tags using Excel. I'm hoping we can do more for our April 15, 2011 conference.
Judy Hallman
Judy Hallman
A few thoughts ...
This would be an awesome addition to the CiviSchool module: http://civicrm.org/civischool
If you are logged into civicrm.org, check this link:
http://civicrm.org/civicrm/event/register?id=105&reset=1
it gives you the option to register a person "other than you" (so could be a child) using the following link:
http://civicrm.org/civicrm/event/register?&cid=0&reset=1&id=105
You will probably need to implement a hook to create the relationship between the parent and the child when information is entered.
might be better to discuss this on the civicrm forums: http://forum.civicrm.org/
lobo
Thank you lobo! I did try to
Thank you lobo! I did try to install the CiviSchool module yesterday to see if it would help me in the right direction with the Child/Parent relationships, but got a 500 server error when running the import script. If I removed any of the variables, I got the error message you would expect: "ERROR: You need to send a valid user name and password to execute this file." I'll look around on the CiviCRM forums but may decide to forgo the module for this stage of development.
Thank you Judy!
I will definitely look into that. Removing the string Individual dedupe rule looks like it may be the best quick option for this. I really appreciate your help!