Using Activity Types in Groups

Activity Types in Groups

Building a group with the Type of Activity as one of the columns in the Layout.

I have customers that often try to put the Type of Activity into the Group Layout.  For example, I want to create a group of Contacts that show the Activities for each Contact. You can set your conditions for your group of Contacts and then add the fields from the Activities table, that will list all Activities for those Contacts. If you use the Activity type field in the group, you can see whether it is a Phone Call, Meeting or To-do. It may also list any of the other types of Activities.

You can see the entire list of available Activity Types by running the sql script below.

select p1.id, p1.text, p1.shorttext from sysdba.PICKLIST p1

left outer join sysdba.PICKLIST p2 on (p1.picklistid = p2.itemid)

where p2.picklistid = ‘PICKLISTLIST’ and p2.text = ‘Activity Types’

Note: You may not need the ‘sysdba’ in front of the picklist table name (2 instances).

Let’s get back see the Activity Type in a Group List view. If you put the Activity Type field directly into your Group, it will list an ID. This ID will not make much sense to you if you are trying to see the Type of Activity.

To get around this you could go to the Formatting of that column and change the format type to “Picklist”, this should change the ID to Text for the Activity Type. However, I have found that I often get an error when trying to use the formatting on this field.

Here is how I get the description that I want: I link the Activity Table (Type) to the Picklist Table (ID ) and then I can choose the Text field from the Picklist table in order to see the Activity Type. In later versions of Infor CRM, this join may already be there. See below.

You could also use the Activity.Type as a condition in your group. By using the sql query listed above, you will see the different Activity Type descriptions. You can set your conditions using the “IN” clause and choose multiple ID’s. Maybe you only want Meeting and Phone Calls in your group. You would choose 262145 and 262146 as your Activity Types. When you complete your conditions for the group, it will only list Meetings and Phone Calls. Keep in mind that when you are building a group of Contacts that have Activity Fields in the Layout of the Group there will be one line item for each different Activity.

I have found that keeping the list of Activity Types readily at hand has come in useful for building groups.

Practice makes perfect. Make a copy of an existing group and make some edits. Worst case scenario, you will need to delete the copy you made. Good Luck!