Add Activity Target consistently

Overview

When creating related activities for other entities (e.g. Contribution, Participant (event registration), Membership) source and target contact IDs holds different contacts and have different meanings if a logged-in user added the entity or an anonymous user (through an online form).

This creates inconsistency and makes any downstream processing harder: searching, creating extensions & automations based on these activities.

Example use-case

If a contact get registered for an event by a logged-in user (someone showed interest in email and a backoffice user adding the registration to Civi) "Event Registration" activity's source (Added by) would be the CRM user and target (With) is the contact who wants to attend the event. This makes sense and the roles match the label: registration was added by the user and the target is the contact. Also works well as audit trails. However, if the contact is using the online registration form source will be the contact and target will be empty.

Proposed behaviour

In my opinion best case would be: if there's no logged in user then source is the system user and target is the contact. This presents exactly what happened: a contact has registered and registration was added by the system, not by a real user manually.

If that's too much of a change or system user determination is hard across all CMS then just add contact to target (in this case source and target would be the same contact_id). This way also has the benefits of the same results for consumers.

In the latter case the downside is there would be redundancy in civicrm_activity_contact table (#2450 (comment 55527)). Regarding this, I argue that consistency worths more than disk space.

Comments

I've found some issues that mention this, but not as the main topic (#2450 (closed)) or hasn't any progress (#2669 (closed)). As it would be nice to change this through all of Civi.

PR at https://github.com/civicrm/civicrm-core/pull/25650

I think your alternative suggestion makes sense:

[in the case of non-logged-in self-service event registration] add contact to target (in this case source and target would be the same contact_id)

This seems like a good way to represent the fact that the contact registered themself.

Unfortunately as far as I know there is no standard concept of a "system user" in Civi. I agree it would be helpful but that's a much bigger proposal.

That makes sense: the target should be the target contact, and the source should be the source contact!

I do see that @eileen brought up concerns about disk space in a previous discussion of this issue (thanks for linking to that). I agree with you @semseysandor that for most Civi instances, this would not be an issue. @eileen, do you think it would be worth adding a setting so that extremely large instances could turn off adding the participant as the activity target?

changed the description

I think we can treat the disk space as non blocking. I think a setting or other method could be added if it turns out to be an issue.

I also agree the registering contact should be the source - but I understand that as being unchanged by the pr

added comp:CiviEvent has-pull-request triaged type:proposal labels

closed

changed milestone to %5.60.0

For the record:

This is fixed for event registration by https://github.com/civicrm/civicrm-core/pull/25650.

There may be other cases where target is empty!

reopened

closed