Is there a way to add a custom field to the Inbound SMS activity type?

Question

I'm working on a Drupal site that includes a view showing unanswered SMS messages. The view shows activities of the Inbound SMS type that have not been revised or deleted, plus a custom PHP filter that restricts it to inbound SMS activities from contacts who don't have an outbound SMS activity with a later date.

The client would to be able to mark off messages that they don't need to answer, and have those no longer show up in the list - basically a way of marking them as read and not in need of a reply. I tried to add a custom field for this to the Inbound SMS activity type - but it doesn't show up as an option! When I choose activities under the "used for" dropdown on the form for creating a custom field, it brings up a second list of specific activity type, but Inbound SMS isn't on it.

Does anyone know if there's any way to get this activity type to show a custom field? Or failing that, any other ideas for how to provide this functionality (a checkbox for marking SMS messages as read, which can then be used as a filter for the view)?

Answer 1

How about adding another activity status? Like "Unread" or "Read".

Depending on how skilled you are, maybe it is possible to have inbound sms set to "Unread" as default. Then your staff could change it to "completed" when they have read it.

If not, you could add the activity status "Read" and then change the status from "Completed" to "Read".

In both ways, you could have a report showing only the default activity status, and after they have changed the status, it diseappers from the report.

Answer 2

For the benefit of anyone else who wants to add custom fields to an activity type that isn't in the list: You could create the custom group using the API, either using the explorer or drush. For example:

drush cvapi CustomGroup.create extends=Activity extends_entity_column_value=46 title="SMS testing"

where 46 is the activity type ID of Inbound SMS on my system.