Possible to extend system object type for Activity?
Is it possible to extend the Activity object type?
We have a scenario where we need to populate a lot of additional information for an activity being logged.
The ActivityValue field has a character limit of 250 chars, can this be increased at all? Is this not a supported action?
We also would not need to do this if we could extend the Activity object type with additional fields, I assume this is not possible as the object isn't available in the Modules area of Xperience by Kentico.
Answers
Liam,
Correct - adding your own fields to extensible object types (like Members, Contacts, digital commerce Orders and Customers, and even Notifications) is supported. Changing the attributes of fields shipped with the product are not, because we expect those fields to work a specific way for our code to function properly.
Activity is currently not extensible. I would make a request on the roadmap to support your scenario. However, because an in-production Xperience application can have millions of activities, expanding the size of activity value could have a negative performance impact on the application.
What were you planning on using this additional data for?
I think we might have discussed this previously, but capturing UTM parameters is the main example.
But also other attributes that the end client would like to captured and used within personalisation, etc.
At the moment as a workaround, we're storing additional data such as UTM parameters in a JSON object in the ActivityValue, but obviously the more you add, the more likely we'd hit the limit.
Dima covered the various options to include custom data with activity tracking for Xperience by Kentico back in 2023!
I do think your scenario makes sense, but a longer term solution requires not only capturing that activity data but also exposing it to marketers and allowing them to act on it in Xperience's admin UI.
No promises, but maybe we'll see future improvements delivered through AIRA 🤔.
Yeah, Dima's approach is very similar to what we've taken, but ultimately has the same problem with character limit of the ActivityValue field being limited to 250 characters unfortunately.
Thanks for confirming anyway, shall submit to the roadmap as an idea.
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