All, I am hoping to use my seedcode complete as a fully functioning contact manager for my sales calls and sales leads etc. I am already logging in all activities through the contacts tab, ie, appointments, follow up phone calls, initial phone calls etc. However, what I want to be able to do is have a view that shows me all activity by account/contact with the last activity that took place.

Basically, I want to pull up the view and see that I have not contacted ABC company in 2 months and I need to at minimum follow up with a phone call at a minimum or maybe schedule an appointment.

I am not sure if I should have something linked to the 'company' or to the individual 'contact. I am thinking the contact just for streamlining purposes. Please let me know your thoughts on this.

Hi there.

As you know, the "recent activity" tab on the Contact's Overview tab shows you all the activity for a given contact with the most recent actvity on top.

Sounds like you want to see the most recent activities for a group of contacts, perhaps adding the most recent activity date, type, and title to the contact's list view. (Once you can add it there, you can add it to any layout based on the contact table occurrence.)

To accomplish this you'll go into the relationship graph and find the relationship between Contact and ContactActivitySimple. Double click on the line connecting these two table occurrences and add a sort to the ContactActivitySimple side of the relationship, sorting by ApptDateStart and then by ApptTimeStart, both descending. (Once you've done this you can return to layout mode and take the sort off the ContactActivitySimple portal on the contact's recent activity tab.)

Now that the relationship is sorted with the most recent items first you can add any fields from ContactActivitySimple to the contact list and the most recent activity will show up. Works great.

Note that if you want to Search on this, looking for example for people whom you haven't contacted since a given date, you'll need to do one more thing in addition to the relationship change mentioned above. Create a calculation field in contacts called something like "LastContactDate" and make this equal to ContactActivitySimple::ApptDateStart. Make sure this calculation is defined from the context of "Contact" and that it is set to return a date, not a number.

Hope that helps.

John,

I have done what I needed to as described. What I need to do now is create an activity report so that I can see all activity for a given date range (needs to be dynamic) and only show the those items with activity. I need to use a script for this but what table to I base this off from in order to create the layout as I am not sure where the actual activities are stored within the database itself. Can you point me in the right direction?

Thx

Chris

John, when I used the contact list view and try to search for all activity between dates etc (on the apptdatestart_k) I get an error telling me that one or more of the relationships is invalid. I did not touch the relationships other than to resort them as described above. Any idea what is going on here?

Hi there.

Two things... the report and the searching.

Report. The simplest way to do an activity report is to use the printed appointment list we already have in place-- or modify this layout to suit your needs. This layout runs from a found set of activity, so if you go to the List layout in the calendar (hit the list icon from any calendar screen showing data OR click "show as list" above any of the contact activity portals) you can search for a range of dates on the appointment list. Once you have the date range records you need, click the "List" button in the print buttons at the bottom of the screen. And of course you can tie all these actions together in one script if you'd like to automate this.

Searching. So I imagine the search works for dates in Contact / Overview / Recent Activity but not for dates in Contact / Activity. Yes? If so it seems you moved some layout objects around. Here is what's going on...

The portal on Contact / Overview / Recent Activity uses a simple, non-filtered relationship to show all activity records for the contact. Searching here is no problem. The portal on Contact / Activity is filtered by global fields so you can't search in that portal. What we'd done is turned off the ability to enter the Contact / Activity fields in Find mode and beneath them placed the same fields from ContactActivitySimple- formatting these fields to be unenterable in Browse mode. Once this is done you're always searching in the simpler, unfiltered relationship.

So if the search is failing I think you may have moved some of this admittedly delicate layout around. Simply take the fields you want to search, duplicate them on the layout, set them to be from ContactActivitySimple and prohibit entry in browse mode. Then send them behind their original cousins and set the original fields to be unenterable in find mode. That should do it.

Or just do all your date range searching in the appointments list view as I mentioned in the report section above.

Hope that helps.