Original start date/time of recurring event

Question

After I modify StartDateTime of an instance of recurring events series, it would be nice if I still could get information about it's original position in the series. Other systems, like Microsoft Exchange and Google Calendar provide special field OriginalStartTime for that purpose, so i was expecting something like that to be present in Salesforce as well. However I couldn't find anything similar in documentation: https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/atlas.en-us.api.meta/api/sforce_api_objects_event.htm

Can it be calculated somehow? I ended up generating a sequence of dates according to recurrence rule and matching occurrences to those dates, by finding the closest one. But this is too complex and won't work in 100% cases. So I wonder is there a better solution?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

You goal is to capture the original value of the Event record, regardless of whether it is changed. Natively, the Event object (nor do most) capture the initial value of a field automatically. What you'll need to do is the following:

1. Create Custom Field on Event (might be "Activities" object) named Intitial Start Date/Time
2. Create a Workflow Rule on the Event Object and set it to run when a record is created and for the criteria, use something like when ActivityDateTime is null --> this way it always fires the Workflow Rule
3. Add an Field Update Action to the Workflow and set the value of Intitial Start Date/Time equal to Event.ActivityDateTime.
4. Activate the Workflow rule after saving

At this point, all new events will have this value stored. You will have to use a data loader to populate a value for all records currently in salesforce.

Now, no matter what value a user changes the ActivityDateTime, you'll always have the initial value when it was born...