Author Topic: Can timelines be calculated backwards from a future deadline? (Read 1552 times)

marc · November 12, 2009, 03:23:50 am

Hi,

we want to implement a case for parliamentary reports, and the crucial information that we know is when it will be voted on. So rather than time the various activities starting from the opening of the case, we would like to set the future deadline, say 10th Dec, and schedule a reminder for 7 days before. Is it possible currently to do this with CiviCase, setting the date for a future event and scheduling other events backwards from there?

A second issue we have run into, is that the "client" for the case should be the report, rather than the rapporteur, or potentially it should be the committee that deals with it. From the posts in the forum, it seems that organisations still cannot be fully-fledged clients. Is this still the case, or have things changed since? Does anyone know a way to potentially work around this?

Thanks,

Marc

demeritcowboy · November 12, 2009, 06:53:01 am

Don't know the current status of orgs as clients but two ideas for scheduling backwards:

1) It sounds like "start date" might not really have any meaning for you anyway, so if you just interpret start date to mean vote date and then put negative offsets in your timeline would that solve it?

2) You can have more than one timeline in your config file, so create the standard timeline to only have one additional entry for the vote activity, and create another timeline with your other activities and put <reference_activity> to be that vote activity and use negative offsets. Then after creating a case edit the date on the prepopulated vote activity, and choose add timeline from the manage case screen to add the second timeline.

Dave Greenberg · November 12, 2009, 03:50:49 pm

Marc - The work to support organizations as clients has not been implemented yet. The original sponsor went with a different approach (and sponsored the contact subtype work for the upcoming 3.1 release). I think Michael McAndrew who is working with an organization that does "health-checks" for NGO's in the UK "may" be moving this forward in the near to mid-term.

http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/CiviCase+VAW+healthcheck+requirements

You might want to contact him and check on status.

marc · November 17, 2009, 07:35:48 am

Hi,

thanks guys. It hadn't occurred to me that I could use negative offsets, but I will certainly try out and let you know how it works. Nifty.

I will have a look at Michael's work, fortunately we should be able to work around it for now, although it is somewhat artificial.

Marc

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Author Topic: Can timelines be calculated backwards from a future deadline? (Read 1552 times)

marc

Can timelines be calculated backwards from a future deadline?

demeritcowboy

Re: Can timelines be calculated backwards from a future deadline?

Dave Greenberg

Re: Can timelines be calculated backwards from a future deadline?

marc

Re: Can timelines be calculated backwards from a future deadline?