Author Topic: Import Activities - encounter medium? (Read 594 times)

nickholden · November 01, 2013, 07:41:39 am

We have records of a mailing which was sent out before the relevant contacts were added to CiviCRM. Now they're in Civi, I want to add an activity record for each of them.

Clearly I can use import activities to do this, but I'm stuck as I don't seem to be able to set the 'Encounter Medium' for the activity during a bulk upload, although I can set a location, an activity status and so on. Is this correct? Any reason why Encounter Medium isn't an available import field?

JonGold · November 01, 2013, 09:23:17 am

Hi Nick,

I suspect that's just an oversight that someone needs to patch in. I note that the field is available via API - so you could always do a command-line import.

As an aside though - I only learned about "Encounter Medium" two days ago, when I had to look in the MySQL tables to get a better understanding of activities. I've never seen that field in the web interface - for instance, it's not available under "New Activity". How do you normally enter data into this field?

nickholden · November 04, 2013, 04:51:03 am

Hi Jon,

Activities entered in the context of a case (in the CiviCase component of CiviCRM) do have a drop-down option for 'Medium' in their creation page in the GUI / web interface. We do most of our activities in that context, so until you mentioned it, I didn't realise that activities assigned to a contact directly (i.e. outside of a case) do not.

I guess for most activities (letter sent, email, phone call) the medium is implicit (or even explicit) in the activity type, but for completeness it would make sense to expand the contact activity pages to include it, given that it now exists in other components of Civi.

Nick

JonGold · November 04, 2013, 09:02:26 am

Hi Nick,

Ah, that makes sense! You could always submit a feature request on issues.civicrm.org, though of course it's more likely to get fixed if you submit a patch or can fund a patch. I'd suggest you submit the Encounter Medium as an import option as a separate issue from adding that field to the default activity screen - that's more likely to be a 5-minute fix someone will just pop out.

If that's not going fast enough for you, and you have shell access to your Civi server, let me know if you'd like help with command line import.

Jon

nickholden · November 20, 2013, 08:03:03 am

Thanks Jon. Given that the activity in question is essentially "send letter", I'm going to live with the fact that the encounter medium isn't set. It's implied in the name of the activity, after all. I've done API imports for other things, but this is so close to being a fit for the import facility in the GUI that it seems a shame to fall back to command line for it.

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Author Topic: Import Activities - encounter medium? (Read 594 times)

nickholden

Import Activities - encounter medium?

JonGold

Re: Import Activities - encounter medium?

nickholden

Re: Import Activities - encounter medium?

JonGold

Re: Import Activities - encounter medium?

nickholden

Re: Import Activities - encounter medium?