Pull data from Drupal entity reference field into CiviCRM?

Question

I'm using Entity References and CiviCRM Entity to create some limited silent auction functionality.

• In CiviCRM, I have an "In-Kind" contribution type with some custom fields for each donation of an item to be auctioned off.
• In Drupal, I have an "Auction Package" content type for each group of one or more items that will be purchasable at auction.
• I created an entity reference field in the auction package so that you can select which items are part of each package. (So you could combine, say, a hotel's gift of a one-night stay with a restaurant's donated gift certificate.)

So I've figured out how to pull CiviCRM information into Drupal. But is there a way to leverage the entity reference field in reverse to pull info from Drupal back into CiviCRM? I'd like to have a reference field in the contribution, or record the package number from the Drupal entity in the Civi contribution. How can I do this?

Note: This is a new system, and I'm fairly new to CiviCRM, so I'm open to doing things differently if reworking anything about the way I have this set up would make this work better.

Answer 1

This is a great question and frankly I've found it challenging to "seamlessly" integrate Drupal and Civicrm. I have successfully used the Drupal Rules module and Civicrm Entity to make Civicrm updates. Alternatively, you can use the rule module and a PHP snippet to invoke the Civi API and make the update.

The civicrm_entity / rules approach does not let you load multiple entities directly but you can use multiple referenced drupal entities.

Civicrm_entity can also write fields directly but you would have to write some code to edit the entity.

Answer 2

So my understanding of your use case is that you want to record in the back end in-kind donations related to items to be auctioned off in bundles. I assume that each item has its own valuation, and that you are mainly interested in getting a custom field on the contribution to reference an item. (I would guess the bundles of items are the sales side of the auction, and that multiple in-kind donations can be dealt with through separate contributions for each item.) Setting up contribution pages and price sets to reference the items in order to expose the items for auction would be something else again.

I would make the custom field an integer, then in code on buildForm hook for the relevant form I would create a select widget that looked up the Drupal entity. If there were budget to improve usability in a minimal fashion I would add a link beside the field that creates a popup form to Add the Drupal entity, and on form close I would refresh the select lookup values. On view custom code needs to convert entity id into entity title or something, maybe an image and caption. If the value of the item is stored in Drupal then when it is selected I would use it overwrite the line item value in CiviCRM.

A similar process could be used to link the donations corresponding to winning bids to the bundle entities that were won.

Answer 3

One possibility would be to use views module to create a view that displays auction package nodes, with a contextual filter for the contribution reference field. Then you provide a block display and configure the block to show on contribution pages; it should show the package that is referencing that contribution.

This doesn't pull any Drupal entity data into the CiviCRM database, but it should allow you to display the entity data for the auction package that is referencing the contribution.

Often times it is ideal to keep the Drupal entities in Drupal and the CiviCRM entities in CiviCRM and connect them using reference fields. You should still be able to display them side by side on the same page (using Views) in virtually any context or use-case.