Changing the activity type of existing activities

Question

I have a particular custom activity type that has around 2000 or so submissions. We're thinking about splitting this activity type into two separate activities. They would have all the same custom fields at this point, but in the future will probably diverge more.

I don't see an option in the UI to change the Activity Type of an existing activity. So a couple of questions:

1. Am I overlooking it or is it just sort of a niche case and doesn't exist?
2. Assuming the existing Activity type and the new one are presently identical, is it safe to change the activity ID in the database directly? Is there anything else that would need to get changed?

Answer 1

You can change activity type in SearchKit from Actions - Update Activities. That's safer than doing it directly in the database. This option doesn't exist in the UI otherwise - there would be a chance of data loss if you changed from an activity type with a custom field to one without it or potentially with built-in activity types.

I'd definitely try this on a few test cases before doing all 2000, just to make sure nothing weird happens.

Answer 2

You can use searchkit to do it, doing a search on activities and then using "Update Activities" from the actions dropdown at the top of the results table.

As you've noted they have the same custom fields, but yes in general that would be an issue if they didn't since it may lead to loss of data.