How can I make a filter to exclude someone who has a certain tag assigned to them? (or custom data field yes/no type)

Question

I'm trying to set up a view (kind of an admin report view) which shows a list of members based on certain filters set up in the view. This is for a large homeschool coop.

• membership type (exposed - user select which type)
• membership status (current, new, grace)
• filtering out those with Do Not Email option checked since this leaves us mostly with those attending our coop days (primary member and kids)
• contact sub type (exposed - user can select adult and/or child)

I have two issues.

The first is that instead of checking for the Do Not Email option, I would much rather be showing Primary Membership Member. But then I have trouble showing the kids as well. I haven't yet learned enough about Views to figure this one out, but I'm getting there slowly but surely. Pretty sure I can figure this out eventually. I can live with current solution for now.

My main problem is that I need one more filter. Some kids in an otherwise active family no longer attend coop (gone off to college, whatever), so I have a Custom Data field to indicate that they are inactive. I have also tried a tag called Inactive Child.

I can't filter on either of these though. I set up a filter and set it to show all records that DON'T have the tag or the custom data field option checked and I get incorrect results for tags (shows people who have any tag at all, not just the one I chose and doesn't show anyone with 0 tags), or NO results (when I use the custom data field). If I set the filter to SHOW those contacts with those option(s) checked, it works. But I can't seem to EXCLUDE them from my results.

Pretty sure I am missing something with how to set this up correctly, but after about 7 hours of trying, I haven't figured it out.

Thank you!

Drupal 7.41 CiviCRM 4.6.11

Answer 1

For the filter part: different types of custom data result in different filter operators being shown in the filter configuration screen. You can experiment with adding different custom types to see the effect on the available operators.

For your purposes, you could add an "Inactive" field of type Alphanumeric, Text. In the view configuration for the filter you should then have the "Is empty (NULL)" operator option. Configuring the filter with that will remove from your view any records that have something in the Inactive field (yes, moved, gone to college etc).

(NB 'text' is not necessarily the best choice from a pure Civi perspective but it will do what you need with Views. If the "Is empty" operator becomes available on more types in future you might prefer one of those.)