Smart Groups - Contacts by Adder

Question

My basic need is to allow a CiviCRM user to view and edit only the Contacts they have added.

It seems that to support that requirement, I need a Smart Group of Contacts, filtered by Adder.

I see that I should be able to filter Contacts using the Changelog "Added By" field. However, I am not retrieving the Contacts when searching "Added By" using email address, username, first/last name or even id. "Modified by" doesn't seems to work either. Changelog date filters do work.

The administrative user I am using for the search does have all rights to all Contacts.

It seems like first/last name is the intended input for the "Added by" Changelog search. Can someone confirm?

What else might I be missing?

I did notice that the first/last name search seems to lower-case my input. I spotted this in the Search Filter output confirmation in the results display. (So, "Test Marketer" changes to "test marketer"). Could this be why there are no matches are returning? I suspect not, but that's all I can spot so far.

Cheers!

Kathy

Answer 1

This is what I have discovered through further trial and error.

1. To search on Changelog by Added or Modified, use first name, last name, or last, first. Using both names separated by a space will not work.

2. The Changelog search actually makes no distinction between Added and Modified. Even if you select the Added radio button to restrict your search to Contacts Added by a particular user, it will still also return Changelog matches on Modified (which does include Added). In other words, whether you select neither radio button, or one or the other, you get the same search results, in which Added OR Modified contains the name you entered.

3. The case of the search name makes no difference in results returned.

The answers to my question, then, are that a Changelog search term may be in the formats of [first name], [last name], or [last, first] and that Changelogs are only filtered by Added OR Modified, despite the UI indication.

Also note the very helpful discussions here about using Webforms with Drupal do create many more options for filtering by contact Add and Modify history.

Kathy

Answer 2

You have to search by the sort name. The default format for this is "last_name, first_name" for individuals.

There does indeed seem to be no support for added_by. You may report that as a bug in JIRA.

I'm not aware that there is an option to have a case sensitive search.

Answer 3

There may be other ways to approach your problem but if you have sorted this via this route then great.

Other options would depend on your CMS

E.g. if using Drupal I would suggest using Webforms and the webform_civicrm module that allows you to easily and simply construct forms for adding/updating civi contacts especially when Relationships are involved.

For logged in users, a View can then be provided that gives them the necessary links to arrive at the page with pre-filled details for multiple contacts (eg cid1 and cid2 etc)

Using the Permissioned Relationships extension takes this further and ensures that users who can access CiviCRM only see contacts that they have a relationship with. The relationships can be daisy-chained so the access can be granted to 2nd, 3rd or nth hand relationships.