Method Community

Good morning,

We have a problem with trying to delete a series activity.

When we delete the series, the occurences are still there. Now the series is gone but all of the occurences are there. There are over 900 ocurrences that we need to delete.

Any ideas on what caused this any idea on how to delete 900 occurences all at once?

Thanks for the help!

Bryan

Hi Bryan,

If you edit the series, you should see all of the occurences listed in a grid.  You can then select all of them and delete the occurences.  Then you can delete the series.

Depending on the area you are in, the design may be different, but the function should be the same.

- Adam

Bryan,

I noticed a few things while trying this out on different screens.  The stock CRM Activity screen seems to delete all of the occurences when deleting the series.  However, on Field Services it does not. I'll put in a ticket with the team for this one.  Was that the screen you were using?  The work around I suggested above will work as long as the series still exists.

- Adam

Hi Adam,

yes we're using the field services activity screen. We have already deleted the series so we have no way of deleting the occurrences all at once. Any suggestions for that?

thanks

bryan

Hi Bryan,

Not anything simple.  You could create a button that would loop through the table and delete the activities.  That would probably be your best bet.

I found out a few things about this. Is it possible that these activities were opened at some point prior to deleting the series?  If so, then the connection to the series is lost, which would be why they weren't deleted.  Any occurence that is later saved is then no longer associated with the series.  There is a field called IsChangedOccurence that is set to true when this happens.  This may be what happened here, since I can't recreate this from scratch. You could export the activity table and see if the activities that were left behind had this field set to True. 

- Adam

Hi Adam,

no we have not opened any of the occureneces. We dont make any changes to them until the week they are due. This has never been an issue and we have had to delete multiple series before when clients cancel service. So, I am not sure what we did wrong here.

How can I create a button to delete the entire list in a table?

Bryan

Bryan, 

You can create a screen with this button or add the button to an existing screen. I did a quick test of this where I created a screen with a grid (of the activities), one field (to input the job I want to delete) and a button.  The actions on the button when clicked looped through the activity table, and found all activities with a RecurrenceType of Occurrence.  Then using a conditional statement, any record with the job I typed was deleted using the "Delete Record from table" action.  

Hope this helps.

- Adam

Thanks adam.

Can you please show me your screenshot of the 'Conditional statement' action and the 'Delete record from table' action?

I almost have it done, I just need help on those 2.

Thanks again for all of the help!

Bryan

Adam,

could I not just loop through the grid and then assign a value to the action result of RecordID in the row and then delete the record from the table where the RecordID is equal to the action result?

I see that was used on another screen.

However, before I do that I want to make sure its right, becasue if not, it will delete all of my activities in my table! That would be disastorous!

Thanks

Bryan

Bryan,

I was advised of a better way, using the grid to see what you're going to delete.  With my original way, if you made a slight mistake, you could delete activities you didn't intend to.  Not something we want to do., obviously.

With the grid, also include the Activity Type so you can filter by work order.  You can then use the grid to filter the activities based on what you need to delete, like job name and such.  The grid will then only be populated with the records you wish to delete.  With your button, instead of loop through table, you can use loop through grid, choosing to loop through "only checked rows".  This way you are only looping through the records you wish to delete.  You can then use the delete record from table action to delete the activity.

- Adam

Hi Adam,

OK, I think I have it. Can you please click the link below and view the short video I made to show you how I did each action?

Thanks again!

Bryan

http://screencast.com/t/a24CMNhfJU5

Hi Bryan,

Everything looks right.  There are a couple of things that I see, more for safety and efficiency that I'd recommend.  First, I'd loop only through the checked rows. This will ensure that you are indeed deleting the intended records, and also not loop through records unnecessarily. It may add to the actual delete process and effort a bit, but it will ensure nothing is deleted that you didn't intend to delete.  Lastly, you don't need that Assign Value to Action Result action.  You can set the Delete Record from Table action to use the value from row like you did to set the action result.

- Adam