Where has a custom field been used?

Question

Drupal 7.65 CiviCRM 5.10.4

Hi everyone,

Bit of a strange question here but I'll explain the context and hopefully there's a solution!

So we have a custom field that asks for people's consent to become a member. We use it specifically on the profile that people fill in to express their interest in being a volunteer. The field is a Yes/No field, with no default answer. We don't use CiviVolunteer or CiviMember. We don't collect membership dues so just have a Group set up for our members, rather than using CiviMember.

When I set that field up I was new to CiviCRM and didn't know about CiviRules and how I could automatically add people to our members group based on them ticking that box.

Now I'm just setting up that CiviRule but realised I haven't done anything with the people who have previously ticked 'yes' on that field, so I did an advanced search of people who have a 'Yes' in that field, and it gave me a lot more users that I was expecting.

Before I add all these people into the members group, I want to double-check whether this field has been accidentally added to any other profiles and set to have a default 'yes' answer. Is there a way I can check where a specific field has been used? I just want to make sure that I don't accidentally add people who haven't specifically said 'yes' to membership, since there won't be a way to remove them and while that membership boost would be amazing, it just seems too high for what we've done in the last few months we've had Civi!

Let me know if you have any questions - hopefully this is clear enough.

Answer 1

I can think of a way, but you need to know how to run SQL on your CiviCRM database.

• Find out the ID number of the custom field.
• Run the following SQL. Change the "7" in custom_7 to the ID number of the custom field:

SELECT cug.id, cug.title 
FROM civicrm_uf_field cuf 
JOIN civicrm_uf_group cug ON cuf.uf_group_id = cug.id 
WHERE field_name = 'custom_7';

It will give you back the title of any profiles that use the field.

Of course, if you're using Webform-CiviCRM or Caldera Forms-CiviCRM integration, this won't catch those!