Is there a way of recording/exposing when an activity is added to CiviCRM?

Question

When adding a custom activity the current time is automatically shown and can be updated. Where people are adding past/ future activities, is the actual time the activtiy is submitted also recorded somewhere in CiviCRM?

Is there a way of extracting this information?

Or should I add an extra date field in the custom data- default set to know to record the submission date?

Answer 1

The creation date of an activity is not, by default, stored in CiviCRM. Depending on what you want to do, you can:

• Create a custom field like you suggested, and write an extension that fills in the value on creation.
• Create a custom field, then define a MySQL trigger to fill in the date. This is less portable, but higher-performance.
• You can enable binary logging (aka detailed logging) as described here, which will create log_civicrm_activity. This is the easiest way to record the date - but doesn't give you a good way to expose this data through the UI.