CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

When creating a new Case Type, the user is presented with a screen that has a Standard Timeline in place, complete with an Open Case Activity Type already included, and ready to be populated with other activity types. According to the documentation, which I'm working on now, the only difference between a 'Standard Timeline' and a 'Timeline', is that the Standard timeline must include an Open Case activity at its start. There doesn't seem to be any other requirement or difference, perhaps other than that the user can add non-standard timelines to an existing case, but can't add a standard timeline.

I note that I can delete the Standard Timeline from my Case Type set-up screen, and the Open Case activity along with it. I've done this, and instead created a Sequence. The sequence has just one activity in it - a phone call. I can save this case type and create a case using this case type. The case summary screen shows my phone call activity.

So this appears to show that I don't need an Open Case activity type at all. After all, I've got a case, and I've just successfully logged a Meeting activity and filed it on the case I've created. So I'm unclear as to the importance or value of the Open Case activity type, or indeed the Standard Timeline.

Searching the activities, I can see that the Meeting activity that I've just created is actually two activities (id = 635 and 636, both created at the same time). One of them (id = 635) is listed as having the subject "(Filed on case 2)". Not sure why there should be two activities created here?

To test things further I created another new case type, again with no standard timeline, and in this one had a (normal) timeline with two activity types - a meeting and a phone call. In terms of scheduling the activities I set it so that the meeting was scheduled 1 day prior to the phone call, and the phone call 1 day after the meeting. Again this case type was accepted and I've successfully set up a case using it.

And i realise that having deleted my Standard Timeline, there is no way to get it back.

To summarise, the case configuration seems happy enough to go along with my choices, and I'm left wondering what the rules are, if any. Should I have a Standard Timeline, do I need to include an Open Case activity type (and if so, why did CiviCRM let me remove these things without complaining). Or are these concepts in place purely to help the user to set up case types that are more likely to work for them?

FWIW, Joanne and I had some discussion about the Standard Timeline several days ago on IRC, and I looked to see how the "Standard Timeline" gets its significance. This may be useful to know in future discussions:

 A) The *first* timeline in the CaseType is used to auto-populate new cases. When you make a new CaseType using the old process (copying/editing an example XML file) or the new process (GUI), the "Standard Timeline" will be first by default.
 B) The *name* should be "standard_timeline" because that is hard-coded in a few places (e.g. CRM/Case/Form/Activity/ChangeCaseStartDate.php and templates/CRM/Case/Form/CaseView.tpl). I'm not sure why this is or how important it is.

The most predictable configuration is the default one -- ie the standard timeline is both (a) the first and (b) named "standard_timeline".

I'm softly +1 on preventing users from deleting "standard_timeline" because it's the quickest way to prevent mistakes given the current constraints, but I think the real problem is the underlying complexity of A+B.

Update: Having checked the issue status on Jira I see you're ahead of the game and have already implemented this.