Limit Values in Open/closed Activities of BP Page

Question

Hi,
On the BP overview page we have views displayed for 'Open Activities' and 'Closed Activiities'. By default they would display all open/closed activities. After a while this can become a lot (and slow, and not very useful).
So, there is a view (CRMV_ACC_1O_CUST) where we can customise the time frame of activities that we wish to see. Our problem is that none of the time frames there are useful to us.
We can choose, 'This Year', which is useless in January or we can choose, "Last Year', which is useless in general. What we can't choose is, 'From last year until today'. That would, of course, be entirely useful.
The entries in the customising table take the form Y-1, Y A, Y1 etc and these formulae are translated at run time to an actual date range. This is hard coded in a CASE statement in FORM build_the_query of Include LCRM_BSP_OIC_1O_SEARCHF01 so changes can only be done as a repair.
The way the standard works is that Y+-1, if run on date 20120126, will return the date range 20110101 - 20111231. This means that we won't see any open activities from January. Y A, which means current year will return the from date as 20120101, which means that we won't see open activities from December.
I read about the BAdI CRM_BP_UIU_BT, which would allow us to inject our own selection parameters; but I can't seem to work out which parameter names should be used for activity start/end dates. Pushing 'STARTDATE', 'FROM' etc result in an empty activities table being displayed.
What I would like, of course, is that Y+-1 would return 20110101 - 20120126 when executed on 20120126. Or to create a new entry such as Y*1 which would mean one year either side of the given date. I can make a repair to the standard code, but I'd rather not have to perform a repair to write my own logic for dates range.
Any other ideas? I assume we're not the only people using the 'Open Activities' view; how did the rest of you handle January?
Thanks for your time,
P.

Answer 1

Hi,
We got an answer from OSS;
For your business requirement, in order to set up a time frame option
like 'last 12 months', you need to extend the customizing table:
"CRMT_ACC_1O_CUST". You can define your own time frame as below.
I will provide a sample for it:
***********************Creating Time Frames***************************
1. Go to Tx: SE16.
2. Enter the table TSCTFGROUP.
3. Create new records here with the following details:
(Please ensure that you enter a sort order that doesn't already exist)
APPL NAME TIMEENTITY LENGTH DEF FLAG SORT ORDER
CRM_1O_LOC M+ - 12 <blank> 14
4. Go to Tx:SE16.
5. Enter the table TSCTFGRT.
6. Create new records here with the following details:
(This table is to create the text. Please ensure that you create here
as many records as you have created in the above step 3)
LANGU APPL_NAME TIMEENTITY LENGTH TF_TEXT
EN CRM_1O_LOC M+ -12 last 12 months
7. If needed, enter the same records in other required languages also.
After this, time frame 'last 12 months' will be visible in the selection list. Now You can select this time frame in the SPRO customizing for certain business transactions. But above changes are not standard changes If you upgrade CRM landscape to higher versions/packages, you will have to transport these changes manually.
That was the answer, we've done as was suggested and things are fine now.
You can have a programmer look at
Include: LSSC_RULESF03
Form:  compute_dates_f
To see how the formulae are translated at runtime.
For instance, you'll see that you can create an entry such as D365, which means 365 days before until 365 days after today. However, in the code there is no way for M or Y* to be translated; a programmer can explain that to you if required.
I hope that this helps someone at some point,
Patrick.