How to enable Create new Activity for the Activity Table

[Billy_C]

Hi,

I want to create the Ticket table, which should be an activity since a ticket has a subject, description, duration, start and end date.

Now when I scrolled down, I saw that I wasn't able to enable "Creating a new activity", why is this not possible?

After all, a Ticket can have multiple emails, phone calls and even tasks.

What would be the best way for such a situation?

Use a secondary table in between the ticket and the activities?

Any ideas how to solve this?

Thanks in advance!

Billy

[dpoggemann]

Hi @Billy_C ,

I would create the ticket as a standard table vs. activity table.  This is similar to the "Case" entity as part of Dynamics 365 to manage issue tickets (cases).  If it is a standard entity then you can have Activities connected to it as you are trying to do and you can then relate emails, tasks, etc. to the "Ticket" entity.

[Billy_C]

Hi @dpoggemann,

So I have been thinking about it, and I think that making the Ticket table a standard table would indeed be the best option.

Now because we want tickets to appear on our timelines as well, I am thinking that it might be a good idea to have like a separate table that holds the ticket status.

That way the Ticket Status can be an activity table that is displayed on the timeline and for every table we wish to connect to our ticket we could create a duplicate Ticket status but with a different table inside the regarding. Since we want tickets to appear on contacts, companies and projects (mainly) and maybe other tables in the future.

Do you think that this might be a good strategy to get the functionality from both table types?

Thanks in advance!

Kind regards,

Billy

[dpoggemann · Accepted solution]

Hi @Billy_C ,

To be honest I am not sure as maybe my brain is wrapped around how I have used cases in the past (similar to your tickets) and it has never been in the way you are discussing...  I have always used the Case entity as a primary issue ticket and then created relationships to specific tables like Customer, Contact, Project, etc. as lookups on this entity.  I know this makes it a little more specific and not polymorphic like the Activity entity where you can connect through a Regarding entity to anything but it has worked well for me.

You can extend your Ticket entity to do the following:

1. Create relationships to Customer, Contact, Project (and future entities) by adding lookup columns
2. Create timeline within the ticket to track related tasks, emails, and other activities
3. Create hierarchical ticket relationships with parent id
   1. This is where you could have multiple child ticket that may connect to multiple projects for a customer, one for each project as an example.  You could create processes that when you close the parent it closes all the child tickets...
4. Define a business process flow for your Ticket entity to walk through the process to close the tickets

I am not saying don't go down your path if it makes sense to you, just articulating how I would do it...

Example Case entity in Customer Service: