Request for comments on case start date and open case issues

[demeritcowboy]

Brief description of problem:
There is a redundancy/mismatch between the open case activity date and case start date which becomes disconnected after the initial case creation. For most organizations, if not all, case start date and the open case activity date are the same date.

For clarity, "date of first contact with client" may or may not be different - it depends on the intake process. In the cases where it is different the solution is easy (create a new activity type or a custom field). In the cases where it is the same, being able to enter a time component on open case would be helpful, without affecting the former.

More technical details:
1) User creates new case. Enters Dec 1 as start date.
2) Case is created fine but Open Case activity gets created with:
(a) Creation date equal to "now" (fine).
(b) Activity Date equal to Dec 1 + current time. (Odd, but not the main problem.)
3) User goes back to edit the open case activity and changes the date, but what they end up changing is the open case activity date, not the case start date. As noted for most organizations there is no difference between these two dates.

The "proper" solution is to not treat case as a separate data object itself but rather as a view on the set of activities, but this is a bit abstract and difficult to implement/configure, hence the current existence of the case data object and storing case start date separately.

So given that, one option is to ensure that the two are always in sync. Database triggers are already required for logging, so maybe that's one solution, but it could be a barrier to installing civicase.

Another option is changes like so:
1) Add the time component to the open case form in initial create mode. (Case start doesn't have a time component at all, so it will get discarded in the database, but the open case activity date will retain it.)
2) Update the change case start date form to add a time component, and on save also update the open case activity's activity date.
3) On subsequent edits of open case where the date has changed, generate a "change case start date" in the background and update the case start date.

So the main visible change for most users would be that editing open case activities updates the start date. If that's a problem, there could be a checkbox option that defaults to the current behavior (although you could argue the new behavior should be the default).

I can do the coding, just wondering if this is going to cause problems for anybody.

[demeritcowboy]

Just bumping this to see if anyone has any comments?

[Dave Greenberg]

Dave - This seems like a safe change - but of course I'm not a real user :-)