Audience manager - can't sort by creation date

Question

One of out clients address books now contains +1000 Contacts - this triggers the following message when the contact list is dsplayed:

Contacts displayed: 1000 (additional Contacts not shown, modify search criteria to decrease results)

The problem is the list is in creation date ascending order, so any newly created contacts are not shown.

This is an issue because creation date is not an available criteria to search by in the Audience Manager interface nor can a date be added to the <ContactListColumns> as this only accepts extended details and our client can't now filter down the list to only show new contacts.

(There is no other identifier of a new contact at the moment other than creation date).

This seems like something to pass onto http://ideas.sdltridion.com/ but my conclusion is this is simply not supported in the product - is that correct?

Possible options:

• Update our application to set a keyword when creating contacts e.g "New" or something. This can then be added to the filter.
• GUI extension/data extender to add creation date as a column. Not sure if this data is part of the XML already in use or if I'd have to retrieve it for each contact (performance concern).
• Custom page to effectively replace the Audience Manager where we can emit the creation date in our own data list.

Anyone tackled this before - have I missed something that would help?

Cheers

Answer 1

You could consider creating a custom column on the [CONTACTS_EXTENDED_DETAILS] table on the [TRIDION_CM_EMAIL] database (if you choose this method, there are a number of other tables you need to update). You could then populate the date on which the contact was populated and add the custom column to your OutboundEmail.xml configuration file, for example:

<ContactDetail name="CREATION_DATE" enableSearch="true"> 
    <Label>Created</Label> 
</ContactDetail> 

Setting ‘enableSearch’ to true will allow the column to be filtered within the Address Book. This should allow you to also search for dates less than, or more than a specified date.

Answer 2

Just as a follow-up to this SDL Support have confirmed that

... getting Contacts based on the creation date is not currently supported out of the box, and thus this would be perceived as an enhancement request

Off to http://ideas.sdltridion.com/ ....