Drupal CiviCRM Entity in Rules: How to loop over all members of a group?

Question

I am using civicrm_entity-7.x-2.x-dev to build a rule using Rules module. I want to use the action "CiviCRM Contact Send Email" to send an email to all members of a CiviCRM group.

So I need to loop over all of the contacts in a group and fire this action. The problem is that I don't see a way to provide a list of group-member contacts as a Rules loop.

I tried "Fetch CiviCRM entity by property" which can fetch a group using the Group ID. That works fine. However once this group entity is fetched, there is no variable like fetched_group:list-of-member-contacts - I only get a chain that leads to the contact who created the group or the contact who last updated the group. No "list of contacts in group"

Any pointers on sending CiviCRM mail with Rules to existing CiviCRM Groups/mailing lists?

Answer 1

You can use the Views Rules module: https://www.drupal.org/project/views_rules

This will provide a Views Loop: from the project page: "A view loop is similar to a regular Rules loop, but allows looping over rows of view results."

So enable that module, and then create a view that lists contacts that are in the group you desire.

Some basic instructions from the Views Rules project page:

Install the module (and make sure Rules UI and Views UI are both enabled)
Configured Views
    Add a view (with some fields)
    Add a "Rules" display
    Configure row variables
    Save
Configure Rules
    Add a rule
    Add the "Collect view result rows" action or add a view loop
    Select the "Rules" display
    Configure the parameters and variable names
    [Do what you want with the newly available variables]