CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Looks like good progress has been made since beta7 on the CiviCase case type UI.

Three points:

1. Despite locking down the Standard Timeline and its associated Open Case activity in order to stop users from creating problems for themselves by creating case types without either of these things in place, the Open Case activity type is still listed in the initial listing shown in the 'Activity Types' tab within the 'Activities' section, with a max instances of 1. I think that its appearance in this listing is redundant as it must now be used, and therefore cannot be selected from within the case as it has already been used by the Standard Timeline. If there is a valid use case for having more than 1 instance of an Open Case activity I don't know what it is, but if so, then max instances of 1 should not be the default.

2. Still in the Activity Types tab I see that I can include activity types in my case type that - as far as I'm aware - don't make sense, as they are activity types that are used by other components of CiviCRM to ensure that other actions are logged (I would term these as background activities). These include things like Contribution, Inbound email, Bulk email, etc. If activity types of this nature were included in the Activity types listing and thereby made available to the case manager, that person would surely get confused if they added a Contribution activity to a case thinking that it would allow them to record a contribution and file it to the case - because as far as I'm aware it doesn't work like that (it would be great if it did). A further example: I added the Activity Type 'Bulk email' to the housing Support case type, and was able to create that activity in my case - but of course no bulk email was created or sent - I merely created a record that such a message was sent. Without going through all of the Activity types and testing them one by one I'm not sure which activity types make sense to be included and which don't - I don't have that breadth of knowledge of CiviCRM in general and CiviCase in particular at my fingertips. But I've highlighted two that are nonsensical, which is a start.

3. All the case activity types, which I thought we agreed would be not available from within this UI but would be automatically included as needed, do seem to still be available to add. Again, form a user perspective, this doesn't make sense.

It seems that these points aren't going to be addressed judging by the lack of response so far. Again, it does seem a real shame when so much excellent work has been done to develop this slick new UI on to the CiviCase component, not to iron out these issues which will IMO substantially detract from the loveliness that is CiviCase.