CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I'm confused by the new interface onto the Case Type configuration. It may simply be that the documentation, which I'm looking at while I'm working with the beta install, needs some more work.

When I create a new case type, (having previously set up all the required activity types and relationships), I see the Activities pane at the bottom of the screen. The default active tab is "Activity Types", and this has one activity type - "Open Case" already listed. I'm invited to add further activity types to this listing. The docs tell me that this listing is "a list of all activity types that are valid to add to this type of case", and then goes on to explain that:

"Several activity types will probably be needed for any type of case. Be sure to include them in this listing: Open Case, Change Case Status, Change Case Type, Follow up. You will use Change Case Status to close a case. Follow up is a useful general activity type for most case settings.

NOTE - the Activity Types listing needs only those activities that a user might choose to add to the case.  Activities that you include in a Timeline or Sequence do not need to be in this list. "

The inclusion of activity types such as "Change Case Type" and "Change Case Status" are confusing, for two reasons. In the current stable release, these activity types are available to cases by default - the user does not need to explicitly make them available to a case type. Has this changed in 4.5? Do we need to explicitly list in this "Activity Types" listing all activity types that the case might require? The last but one quoted sentence above from the documentation suggests not, implying instead that we only need include activity types here that the user might choose to add to the case. But "Change Case Status" is, as far as I'm aware not really an optional activity type, as it is needed to close a case, and is therefore almost as essential as "Open Case".

Should we also include activity types here such as "Assign Case Role", or "Link Cases"?

In summary I'm not clear what the role of this "Activity Types" listing is. If it only for optional activity types like 'phone call' then it is of less importance than the Standard Timeline, and so that should be the default active tab when setting up a new case type. If it is more important than simply a listing of optional activity types, then its role needs to be clearer.

Also there is a noticeable lack of on-screen help available currently on this page.

I'm used to setting up Case Types the old way, so that may be clouding my view.

Clearly this UI-based approach to configuring case types is a major step forward, so I'm keen to help ensure that it gets implemented as well as it can be done in its first outing.

Phew, that's encouraging. Not me getting the wrong end of the stick, which is not uncommon.

The case with "simple" activity types being always available was true, but wasn't explicit. i.e. the user could create a Phone Call activity and then file it to a case, but if the Phone Call activity type was not included in the case configuration xml file, then it wasn't available in the in-case "Add Activity" drop-down, which I thought was odd, but worked around it by manually adding them in.

For my money, as well as having the reserved case activity types hidden from the UI - as you say the user has no need to see these in normal circumstances - I would have all the "simple" activity types included by default insofar as they should generally be available from within the case summary "Add Activity" drop-down.

At the same time I would imagine that by and large the custom activity types defined by a user for a given case type would often only be used once within a given case timeline/workflow, and so their automatic inclusion in the in-case "Add Activity" drop-down in many cases feels a bit odd.

In a sense this goes back to my question about what the "Activity types" listing in the case config is there for. For me I'd like to be able to specify what appears in this "Add Activity" drop-down, which is a really important tool for the case manager. Maybe that's what this does - its just not clear.

As Coleman mentioned, the reserved case types (e.g. Change Case Status, Change Case Type ... etc.)  do not need to be added to the Activity Types tab - they are used by specific workflows on the Manage Case page. I agree we should remove them from the list of available Activity Types (dropdown).

Please note that we are substantially (++++) over the funded budget for this project - so for 4.5 only actual bugs will be addressed (unless a patch is provided ASAP). We can look at doing a set of additional usability improvements at an upcoming sprint / in the 4.6 cycle. I've started a new issue for this in Jira which we can add to - as I suspect we'll discover some additional usability issues (and use cases) etc once this is rolled out.

https://issues.civicrm.org/jira/browse/CRM-15162

Is there scope to include any on-screen help pop-ups in time for 4.5?

There is a notable absence of help, and given that it's a new feature some guidance may well help users to avoid some of the pitfalls and reduce the volume of forum posts.

Thanks Michael, I'll look into it.

I think the first bit to get right is the documentation, and then we can then tie in any on-screen help to that as needed.