How can I make a Custom Search do an initial search?

Question

I have created a custom search, and it works nicely. What I would really like though is to pass default values to the custom search and it doing the initial search with those values.

The user can then change the search criteria if he/she wants another filter.

Is that possible and how can I do that?

Answer 1

Even i wanted an easy way of doing this as well but the current architecture of CiviCRM doesn't allow it automatically. I could achieve this by copying few functions(see below) from CRM_Core_Form_Search into my custom search file

  /**
   * @return array
   */
  public function getSearchFieldMetadata() {
    $searchFieldMetadata['contact'] = [
      'sort_name' => [
        'title' => ts('Sort Name'),
        'type' => CRM_Utils_Type::T_STRING,
      ]
    ];
    return $searchFieldMetadata;
  }

  /**
   * Get the validation rule to apply to a function.
   *
   * Alphanumeric is designed to always be safe & for now we just return
   * that but in future we can use tighter rules for types like int, bool etc.
   *
   * @param string $entity
   * @param string $fieldName
   *
   * @return string
   */
  protected function getValidationTypeForField($entity, $fieldName) {
    switch ($this->getSearchFieldMetadata()[$entity][$fieldName]['type']) {
      case CRM_Utils_Type::T_BOOLEAN:
        return 'Boolean';

      case CRM_Utils_Type::T_INT:
        return 'CommaSeparatedIntegers';

      case CRM_Utils_Type::T_DATE:
      case CRM_Utils_Type::T_DATE + CRM_Utils_Type::T_TIME:
        return 'Timestamp';

      default:
        return 'Alphanumeric';
    }
  }

  /**
   * Get the defaults for the entity for any fields described in metadata.
   *
   * @param string $entity
   *
   * @return array
   *
   * @throws \CRM_Core_Exception
   */
  protected function getEntityDefaults($entity) {
    $defaults = [];
    foreach (CRM_Utils_Array::value($entity, $this->getSearchFieldMetadata(), []) as $fieldName => $fieldSpec) {
      if (empty($_POST[$fieldName])) {
        $value = CRM_Utils_Request::retrieveValue($fieldName, $this->getValidationTypeForField($entity, $fieldName), NULL, NULL, 'GET');
        if ($value !== NULL) {
          $defaults[$fieldName] = $value;
        }
        if ($fieldSpec['type'] === CRM_Utils_Type::T_DATE || ($fieldSpec['type'] === CRM_Utils_Type::T_DATE + CRM_Utils_Type::T_TIME)) {
          $low = CRM_Utils_Request::retrieveValue($fieldName . '_low', 'Timestamp', NULL, NULL, 'GET');
          $high = CRM_Utils_Request::retrieveValue($fieldName . '_high', 'Timestamp', NULL, NULL, 'GET');
          if ($low !== NULL || $high !== NULL) {
            $defaults[$fieldName . '_relative'] = 0;
            $defaults[$fieldName . '_low'] = $low ? date('Y-m-d H:i:s', strtotime($low)) : NULL;
            $defaults[$fieldName . '_high'] = $high ? date('Y-m-d H:i:s', strtotime($high)) : NULL;
          }
          else {
            $relative = CRM_Utils_Request::retrieveValue($fieldName . '_relative', 'String', NULL, NULL, 'GET');
            if (!empty($relative) && isset(CRM_Core_OptionGroup::values('relative_date_filters')[$relative])) {
              $defaults[$fieldName . '_relative'] = $relative;
            }
          }
        }
      }
    }
    return $defaults;
  }

and added below snippet in my custom search file __construct() function(at the beginning)

    $this->_force = CRM_Utils_Request::retrieve('force', 'Boolean');
    if ($this->_force) {
      foreach (array_keys($this->getSearchFieldMetadata()) as $entity) {
        $formValues = array_merge($this->getEntityDefaults($entity), $formValues);
      }
    }

HTH

Pradeep