Creating an Appointment through Workflow with a busy status

Posted by Brendan Landers on November 2, 2009  |  Comments (2)

Recently one of our clients was implementing a sales process via workflow and asked the following question:

"When I am creating a  Appointment record through workflow, why can’t I select  busy in the “Show Time As” field?"

   
 
They assumed this was a CRM defect because when a user creates a new appointment they can select the Busy value in this field.

The “Show Time As” field is actually the Status Reason (statuscode) field from the Appointment entity.  The Status Reason displays values based on the Status (statecode) of the record.  When a record is created, the status is set to ‘Open’.  As a result, the only corresponding statuscodes available are ‘Free’ and ‘Tentative’.  Therefore, within workflow you need to add a step after the appointment is created to change the record status to 'Scheduled - Busy'. 

Many CRM entities have similar statuscode and statecode relationships which would require similar changes in workflow.