Find Activities Search, default search option for Activity Status will exclude Activities by default which do not have a status of Scheduled or Completed. Confuses and frustrates End Users.

[agileware-justin]

Overview

Find Activities Search, default search option for Activity Status will exclude Activities by default which do not have a status of Scheduled or Completed. This confuses end users when Activities that have different statuses are not shown in search results.

End users feel less confident using the system as a result and are annoyed by having a default option which is wrong.

Before

Using the default search option "Activity Status" criteria, no Activities are returned in the search results.

After

When "Activity Status" criteria is not set, Activities are returned in the search results.

Technical Details

Comments

Relates to #21595

Agileware Ref: CIVICRM-1845

[civibot]

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[wmortada]

This sounds like a useful improvement to user experience.

[colemanw]

This PR has been up for a month with no objections and one +1. I also agree with the concept, so I think this can be merged pending a code review.

To that point, I think we need to take a second look at the line above the one being removed. It pertains to smart groups, I think when editing smart group criteria in a search form. Does that still work correctly after this change? If so then I think everything from L454 can be removed as well, as it's all working to build the variable that now gets discarded by this PR.

[eileenmcnaughton]

I've given this a thumbs up & put a comment into the user interface channel. My first thought was this should go in the dev-digest (which is overdue) but if we get a few more thumbs up before that happens I think it would be enough - my thinking is that the status of activities is not nearly as 'obviously relevant' as the status of contributions

@demeritcowboy or @lcdservices may recall history here? Perhaps the real goal was to exclude cancelled - which IS a reserved status so could get special handling

[lcdservices]

I don't recall the rationale. I suspect it's been in place for a very long time. But I definitely agree that it's not a universally-useful assumption to default to those values.

[demeritcowboy]

I think the main difference with this PR and the other one is that the criteria on the other one was mostly invisible, whereas here at least you can see it, but that's not a reason to keep it. The "spec" mentions it, but doesn't say why (https://issues.civicrm.org/jira/browse/CRM-2532 and civicrm/civicrm-svn@5f2f9bb#diff-fd564196515444184c037fe5dbd66af697beea45deb7995e67af3e4ac50763f7R198).

One thing this PR also improves is if you have a bookmark to activity search like civicrm/activity/search?reset=1&activity_date_time_relative=this.month&force=1, then that is currently confusing before the PR because the form field will have "scheduled, completed", but that's not what it's showing.

On the smart groups, maybe a silly question but how do you create a smart group for activity search? I can do it with search builder but it doesn't use this code, and I can do an advanced search but you can only create a smart group if displaying as Contacts and then while it hits these lines it still seems to set the status correctly anyway.

@jitendrapurohit The smart group part was a fix of yours (d57052f) - would this affect your fix? I can't seem to create a smart group where it ends up mattering.

[petednz]

Support removing the default settings.

[demeritcowboy]

Since @petednz is same shop as @jitendrapurohit I'm going to put merge-ready and unless someone can figure out how to make a smart group where this seems to make a difference it seems good to go.

Jenkins retest this please.

[eileenmcnaughton]

test this please