Progressive Technology Project Release Summary Fields Extension

Published
2013-09-03 14:17
Written by

PTP's first official contribution to the extensions repository is out: Summary Fields!

PTP folks and friends have been working hard to enhance the fundraising aspects of CiviCRM. We have big plans, and expect to release the bits and pieces as they are completed.

Summary Fields is the first to make it out. We've been testing it for a month or two now and, while it has a few quirks (particularly with large data sets), it's fairly stable.

To quote from the README file (written by Mark):
Summary Fields make it easier to search for major donors, recent donors, lapsed donors as well as to show a synopsis of a donor’s history. Summary Fields extends your CiviCRM data by creating a tab of fields that total up and summarize donation history.

Once you’ve completed set-up, a new tab will appear alongside other tabs in contact records showing the totals for each individual.

All of the data in the Summary Fields group are calculated from other data entered into your CiviCRM as contributions, membership or event participation. The benefit of making these items available as calculated fields is that they can be searched in Advanced Search and used as a basis for a smart group as well as for tokens in email and print communications. The set of available fields include:

Total Lifetime Contributions
Total Contributions this Year
Total Contributions last Year
Amount of Last Contribution
Date of Last Contribution
Date of First Contribution
Largest Contribution
Count of Contributions
Average Annual (Calendar Year) Contribution
Date of Last Membership Payment
Amount of Last Membership Payment
Name of the last attended event
Date of the last attended event

You can find the Summary Fields extension in the extensions directory.

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Comments

Awesome work.

Few questions

  • Do the totals sum soft credits too?
  • What are the quirks for large data sets?
  • Are these calculated on triggers? If so do they add much overhead to speed?

 

Good pointon the soft credits... we're currently not totaling software credits although I can see how that might be useful.

The calculation is done using triggers based on individual records being updated. As a result, the performance is pretty good during normal use.

However (and this is the "quirky" part), when you first enable it on a site with a huge data set, it has to run the calculations on all the existing data. That can take a very long time, which sometimes causes timeouts, etc.

Anonymous (not verified)
2013-12-16 - 18:16

Great additions! We're at 4.2.x and plan to upgrade to 4.3.8 because this functionality is critical to us. Will it work with 4.4 now or soon? If so, we'll upgrade to latest. Thanks.

We've done initial testing on 4.4 and it seems to work just fine.

Hi Jamie,

I would like to discuss the best way to get the strings from your extension to transifex so it can be localized to other languages. Also we found one or twor minor issues that we would like to report.

Should I do this in this forum? Or are you using some kind of issue tracker or discussion forum for that purposes?

Regards
Fabian

Hi Fabian - Unfortunately, I don't have an issue tracker setup.

However, we would greatly appreciate any patches for ensuring strings get localized (I should be doing automatically by now).

Please report any bugs, for now, to me directly at jamie@progressivetech.org.

Also, feel free to fork and/or send me patches. I've made a numer of changes since the last release. To get the latest code:

git clone git://git.progressivetech.org/extensions/net.ourpowerbase.sumfields.git
Anonymous (not verified)
2014-02-11 - 16:15

Does/will this extension be able to filter by single or multiple Contribution Types? I am wondering because this sounds like it will fill a huge gap in CiviCRM's usability for our organization, but not unless we can choose filter or sort by Contribution Type. Thanks for any info.

Yes - the extension does allow you to specify which contribution types are used to count the totals.

Also - I just released version 1.0.4 which includes tax deductible totals as well.

Thanks for your reply and work! This sounds like an almost necessary extension if one works with donors. I will work to get it set up for our organization.

Anonymous (not verified)
2014-03-14 - 14:24

Great extension - very useful!  Not sure if date fields support relative PHP expressions but that might offer more flexability and help consolodate some of the options.  Thanks!

Hi all - I just released version 1.0.6. The only change is that it's been properly internationalized and now has a german translation. Thanks Björn Endres!