Activities SubPanel - How to Fix the Date Order problem that annoys users - in V7 .11-.14

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My users are very happy that this is solved - they were constantly annoyed/confused: especially about the Meeting time error.

NB -for V8 users - the panel has worse Date problems than below. No fix has been tried on V8. (But V8 users are encouraged to test - the changes may solve it, perhaps?)

For Suite7 versions 14,13,12,11 and before: the Activities sub-panel: does NOT sort in chronological Order. Clicking on the column header Date_Due: also does NOT produce chronological order: which confuses users.

To make the problem very visible: If you have 2 each of Calls, Meetings and Tasks in the panel - to see that no matter what dates they are: they will ALWAYS stay grouped by module.
IE (screenshot from official V7 demo at SuiteCRM)

image
image1117×503 64.4 KB

2nd problem - Meetings are listed with their End_Time - BUT Calls with their Start_time. So users get confused about Meetings …

How long has it been a problem?
V14 has the problem right now at demo.suiteondemand.com
According to gitHub - the files we need to change to solve the problem, are unchanged since 2019.
Fails today on my 7.12. In 2019 it was reported on 7.11.18.

V8 - is even more broken at the official demo today - NO dates show at all in Activities sub-Panel. These changes below have NOT been tested on V8.

Solution - requires code change- but is very easy

There are 3 files to change - all called ForActivities.php. That file can be found in each of the 3 modules: Calls, Meetings, Tasks at

  • modules/<Calls|Meetings|Tasks>/metadata/subpanels/

Calls: this is the broken file in the official github

  • find the block starting: ‘date_end’

  • replace with:

      'date_start' => [
      'vname' => 'LBL_LIST_DUE_DATE',
      'width' => '10%',

Meetings: this file in github

the same as for Calls

Tasks: this file in github

  • find the block starting: ‘date_due’

  • replace with:

      'date_due' => [
      'vname' => 'LBL_LIST_DUE_DATE',
      'width' => '10%',
      'alias' => 'date_start',
      'sort_by' => 'date_start',
  ],

Upgrade safe change
Follow the normal good practise: don’t edit the files above directly -but copy them to custom/modules/… etc… and edit there.

Related GitHub issues

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