The SalesLogix Activity & History tables use a 'Type' field to store the type of Activity. If you look at the TYPE field, you'll see that the values there are numeric values such as '262147'. This number represents the type for the given activity or history record. But for someone new to SalesLogix it might be difficult to determine how & where these types are defined.

These “types” are stored as a picklist named “Activity Types”. Take a look at the items in the picklist with the following query:

select p1.id, p1.text, p1.shorttext from picklist p1 
left outer join picklist p2 on (p1.picklistid = p2.itemid) 
where p2.picklistid = 'PICKLISTLIST' and p2.text = 'Activity Types'

This query will return three columns from the picklist table. The ID, which you will find is the numeric value stored in the TYPE field of the Activity & History tables (such as “262147“), the Text field, which is the text name for the Activity Type (such as “To-Do”, “Phone Call”, etc), and the ShortText, which is the abbreviated text for the activity type (such as “TODO”, “CALL”, etc). The results of the above query will show you the following:

262156  Database Change    DBCHANGE
262150  Dialog             DIALOG
262153  Document           DOC
262154  E-Mail             EMAIL
262151  Event Selection    ESP
262155  Fax                FAX
262157  Form               FORM
262163  Literature Request LITREQ
262145  Meeting            APPT
262148  Note               NOTE
262158  OLE                OLE
262161  Page               PAGE
262162  Personal Activity  PERSONAL
262146  Phone Call         CALL
262160  Process            PROCESS
262149  Question           Q
262152  Report             REPORT
262144  Start              START
262164  Stop               STOP
262147  To-Do              TODO

Having these “types” in the picklist table make for an easy join from the activity and history tables to display the type's associated text with the history or activity items.