building on sugarcrm

www.it-ebooks.info www.it-ebooks.info Building on SugarCRM www.it-ebooks.info www.it-ebooks.info Building on SugarCRM John Mertic Beijing • Cambridge • Farnham • Köln • Sebastopol • Tokyo www.it-ebooks.info Building on SugarCRM by John Mertic Copyright © 2011 SugarCRM Inc. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. Published by O’Reilly Media, Inc., 1005 Gravenstein Highway North, Sebastopol, CA 95472. O’Reilly books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales promotional use. Online editions are also available for most titles (http://my.safaribooksonline.com). For more information, contact our corporate/institutional sales department: (800) 998-9938 or corporate@oreilly.com. Editor: Julie Steele Production Editor: O’Reilly Publishing Services Cover Designer: Karen Montgomery Interior Designer: David Futato Illustrator: O’Reilly Publishing Services Printing History: July 2011: First Edition. Nutshell Handbook, the Nutshell Handbook logo, and the O’Reilly logo are registered trademarks of O’Reilly Media, Inc. The image of a Honey Buzzard and related trade dress are trademarks of O’Reilly Media, Inc. Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book, and O’Reilly Media, Inc., was aware of a trademark claim, the designations have been printed in caps or initial caps. While every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book, the publisher and authors assume no responsibility for errors or omissions, or for damages resulting from the use of the information con- tained herein. ISBN: 978-1-449-30980-0 [LSI] 1310752128 www.it-ebooks.info Table of Contents Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii 1. What is SugarCRM? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 A breakdown of the editions 1 Community Edition 2 Professional Edition 2 Corporate Edition 2 Enterprise Edition 2 Ultimate Edition 3 What you need to install SugarCRM 3 How about running in the cloud? 3 What do you get with SugarCRM? 4 Modular design 4 MVC Framework 5 Metadata-Driven Views 5 User Authentication and Access Control 6 External Services Integration 7 Web Services API 8 Ease of Administration 8 Easy to use developer tools 9 Upgrade safeness 9 Summary 10 2. Developing on the SugarCRM platform . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Customizing the out-of-the-box modules with Studio 11 Adding and changing fields 12 Building custom business logic with Sugar Logic 13 Changing view field layouts 16 Add new module relationships 17 Customizing the language string used in your module 19 Building new modules using Module Builder 21 v www.it-ebooks.info Defining your new module 21 Deploying the new package to the world 23 Defining Workflows 24 Create conditions for workflow execution 25 Alerting and Actions for a workflow 26 Summary 28 3. Building your application using the Sugar GUI Developer tools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 Application overview 29 Customizing out-of-the-box modules with Studio 30 Sponsors 30 Sponsorships 30 New modules to create with Module Builder 34 Attendees 34 Speakers 35 Events 38 Summary 39 4. Diving deeper with custom code . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 Bring the new happens with the conference into the Activity Stream 41 Show new attendees in the Activity Stream 42 View incoming speaker proposals in Activity Stream 43 See feedback immediately in Activity Stream. 44 Automate speaker acceptance and rejection 46 Calculating Average Session Feedback Score 48 Summary 51 5. Integrating your application with the outside world . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 Attendee registration form 54 Call for Papers submission form 57 Session Feedback Form 63 Summary 68 vi | Table of Contents www.it-ebooks.info Preface Conventions Used in This Book Italic Indicates new terms, URLs, email addresses, filenames, and file extensions. Constant width Used for program listings. This icon signifies a tip, suggestion, or general note. Using Code Examples This book is here to help you get your job done. In general, you may use the code in this book in your programs and documentation. You do not need to contact us for permission unless you’re reproducing a significant portion of the code. For example, writing a program that uses several chunks of code from this book does not require permission. Selling or distributing a CD-ROM of examples from O’Reilly books does require permission. Answering a question by citing this book and quoting example code does not require permission. Incorporating a significant amount of example code from this book into your product’s documentation does require permission. We appreciate, but do not require, attribution. An attribution usually includes the title, author, publisher, and ISBN. For example: “Building on SugarCRM by John Mertic (O’Reilly). Copyright 2011 SugarCRM Inc., 978-1-449-30980-0.” If you feel your use of code examples falls outside fair use or the permission given above, feel free to contact us at permissions@oreilly.com. vii www.it-ebooks.info Safari® Books Online Safari Books Online is an on-demand digital library that lets you easily search over 7,500 technology and creative reference books and videos to find the answers you need quickly. With a subscription, you can read any page and watch any video from our library online. Read books on your cell phone and mobile devices. Access new titles before they are available for print, and get exclusive access to manuscripts in development and post feedback for the authors. Copy and paste code samples, organize your favorites, down- load chapters, bookmark key sections, create notes, print out pages, and benefit from tons of other time-saving features. O’Reilly Media has uploaded this book to the Safari Books Online service. 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Find us on Facebook: http://facebook.com/oreilly Follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/oreillymedia Watch us on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/oreillymedia viii | Preface www.it-ebooks.info [...]... application It can be downloaded from http://www.sugarforge.org/ content/downloads/ Professional Edition Professional Edition is a commercial edition of the product that builds upon the feature set of the Community Edition Of these numerous additional features added to Professional Edition, the most notable are: • Support for Teams, where users can be grouped together by their department or job function... platform and build upon it, let’s take a peek at the various editions of SugarCRM, how and where we can deploy SugarCRM, and some of the components that come with SugarCRM out of the box to enable you to build applications with ease A breakdown of the editions The latest version of SugarCRM as of this writing is 6.2, released in June 2011 For this version we expanded the number of editions of the product... popular professional social network, which allows you to look up information about the various people and organizations stored in your SugarCRM application Other integrations to InsideView and Hoovers come with the different editions of SugarCRM, and developers have built additional integrations using the Connectors framework with Google, Twitter, and many other services Figure 1-3 LinkedIn Connector What... Relationship through Studio 18 | Chapter 2: Developing on the SugarCRM platform www.it-ebooks.info When you save the new relationship, it will automatically add the needed UI components to expose the relationship and enable users to control it This differs depending upon the relationship type used as follows: • For One-to-One relationships there will be a field on both the primary and related module’s EditView... for developer customization, and we don’t alter it during the upgrade process Summary In this chapter, we looked at a brief overview of SugarCRM, considering the various editions of the product and deployment options We then looked at the various platform features that make SugarCRM such a compelling platform to build an application on top of Now that we have some background on SugarCRM, let’s dig more... Relationship’ if you want to add a new relationship The relationship editor in Studio allows you to add either a One-to-One, One-to-Many, or a Many-to-Many relationship between the current module and another one You can also specify the label to use to identify the subpanel on the DetailView of a record, as well as specify the subpanel layout to use for the relationship Figure 2-10 Editing a Relationship... the servers, etc) SugarCRM was designed from the beginning with this in mind By relying on the LAMP stack, you can deploy on any platform that provides those components, even cloudbased ones Customers have deployed SugarCRM very successfully on cloud platforms such as IBM Cloud, Amazon EC2, Rackspace, and others And as part of any commercial edition licensing, you can run SugarCRM on Sugar’s own cloud... mobile version, along with mobile clients specific for the iPhone and Android smart phones • Plug-ins for Microsoft Office, namely Outlook, Word, and Excel Corporate Edition This is a new edition of the product added with the Sugar 6.2 release, which adds additional features on top of the Sugar Professional feature set: • An enhanced mobile client with offline storage capabilities for the iPhone, iPad,... developer tools of SugarCRM, and how we can use them in helping to use SugarCRM as a platform for building applications 10 | Chapter 1: What is SugarCRM? www.it-ebooks.info CHAPTER 2 Developing on the SugarCRM platform As we saw back in Chapter 1, the SugarCRM has lots to offer a developer With a robust, modern MVC platform, convenient features, and a customizable and extensible framework, SugarCRM can be... ‘Default’ or ‘Available’ one to make the items able to be searched upon ‘Default’ means the records show up by default in the order listed, while ‘Available’ means the user can configure their instance to show those fields optionally (‘Available’ is on ListViews only) Add new module relationships One of the best properties of SugarCRM is that you can have records related to one another This enables . www.it-ebooks.info www.it-ebooks.info Building on SugarCRM www.it-ebooks.info www.it-ebooks.info Building on SugarCRM John Mertic Beijing • Cambridge • Farnham • Köln • Sebastopol • Tokyo www.it-ebooks.info Building on SugarCRM by. educational, business, or sales promotional use. Online editions are also available for most titles (http://my.safaribooksonline.com). For more information, contact our corporate/institutional. . 1 A breakdown of the editions 1 Community Edition 2 Professional Edition 2 Corporate Edition 2 Enterprise Edition 2 Ultimate Edition 3 What you need to install SugarCRM 3 How about running