Find Activities Search, the default search option of "With" criteria excludes Activities by default. Confuses End Users when 0 results are returned when criteria appears to be correct.

[agileware-justin]

Overview

Find Activities Search, the default search option of "With" criteria excludes Activities by default and confuses end users when 0 results are returned.

End users feel less confident using the system as a result and are annoyed by having a default option which is wrong.

Before

Using the default search option "With" criteria, no Activities are returned in the search results.

After

When "With" criteria is not set, Activities are returned in the search results.

Technical Details

Comments

Agileware Ref: CIVICRM-1563

[civibot]

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[demeritcowboy]

It would be awesome if "this one simple trick" fixes it. I remember there being a bug - https://issues.civicrm.org/jira/browse/CRM-7812 and https://issues.civicrm.org/jira/browse/CRM-9065 (the conversation on the second one is mildly amusing in the context of searchkit). At the time it seemed like the issue was buried deep in the query somewhere. If it was just a need to click the "X" I can't believe I overlooked that.

[wmortada]

Wanted to add a note that this caused some unintended consequences if you export data from the results of an activity search. See: https://civicrm.stackexchange.com/questions/41274/missing-data-when-exporting-activities-from-search-results/41275

[demeritcowboy]

I tried an export and I'm not seeing it so just to clarify:

• Which fields?
• And is it those fields for all records, or just the records that are now being included that weren't before (the ones without With Contacts)?

[wmortada]

@demeritcowboy in that particular case it was fields from the related contact - e.g. Organisation Name. The activity fields were exported but we appeared to be missing the related contact data. My theory is that behind the scenes the search does a join on the contact table, but if you don't select 'with' that doesn't happen so the related contact data is missing.

Yes, those fields for all records - the entire column of the spreadsheet was blank.

I'm not sure if there were any records that weren't included previously. That wasn't an issue for this site.

We've seen this on two separate sites so I don't think it is a quirk of data from one organisation.

[davejenx]

Seeing the same issue, also affecting Organisation Name.

[demeritcowboy]

Yes it seems a side-effect of this PR is that anything contact-related no longer defaults to the "With contact", so for exports if you need contact fields to be from the With Contact then you now have to explicitly select "With" on the search page (with the understanding that it will then exclude any activities that do not have a With Contact). Perhaps we should open a lab ticket for discussion?

[davejenx]

Related but slightly different lab ticket: Exporting Activity Contacts Field Mapping page display just shows target.