So you’ve created a new module in Sugar 5.0 with Module Builder, but now you want to import records into that module. Unfortunately in Sugar 5.0, the import function is not automatically enabled for new custom modules. We have addressed this issue in the upcoming Sugar 5.1 but that doesn’t help you today.

For those of you working with Sugar 5.0, here is a link to a sample module where I enabled the import function. You will need to take a look at the code to see how to do the same for your custom modules. I built this in Sugar Community Edition, so it will only install on Sugar 5.0.0 CE. However the approach is exactly the same for the Sugar Professional and Enterprise Editions.

Details
This module package contains a very basic module called “Work”. I built this module in Module Builder (only took 2 minutes, gotta love MB!) based on the Issue template.

When you unzip the module package, you will see directories called EnableImport, icons and SugarModules. Everything in the icons and SugarModules directories is exactly what you get when you create a module with Module Builder and publish the module package.

The EnableImport directory is where I put the necessary code to enable the import function. This directory contains some sub-directories and five files. I will explain those five files below. I also modified the manifest.php for this package to copy over the required files for enabling import and adding in the menu item on the Work module.

Required Files

1. EnableImport\menus\Import_zz_Work.php - This file is used by the manifest.php to add the Import item to the Work module’s shortcuts menu.
2. EnableImport\modules\Import\config.php - This file registers the Work module (zz_Work) as a module that can be imported.
   NOTE: This is the one out-of-the-box file that you must modify which means this change is not upgrade-safe. You will need to manually merge the one-line change in this file back into your code when ever you do upgrades in the future.
3. EnableImport\modules\Import\Importzz_Work.php - Contains the logic for actually doing the import. If you need to do any special logic (data manipulation, creating special relationships, etc), you will create special functions in this file that get executed at import.
4. EnableImport\modules\zz_Work\field_arrays.php - This file is necessary but unfortunately a relic from the past. Up until Sugar 5.1, the Import module does not use the standard vardefs for defining a module’s required fields but rather keys off of this field_arrays.php file that we used back in Sugar 1.0 and 2.0. So you will need to register all of your module’s required fields in this file otherwise your import will fail. Thankfully Sugar 5.1 finally puts this dependency to rest.
5. EnableImport\modules\zz_Work\Import.php - This file actually calls the Import module code when you click on the Import button.

On a final note, be sure to take a look through the manifest.php file for this package to see how I modified it to install these required files.

Have fun and let me know how this works for you.

Clint

I’m at the LinuxTag event here in Berlin this week and am really pleased with how good of an event it is. It is easily on par with the LinuxWorld events back in the US.  And of course Germany leads Europe in open source enthusiasm and growth.

As always, one of the best parts of attending a conference for me is to see what other companies and projects are doing with SugarCRM.

One of the hits for us at the show has been the Talend connector for SugarCRM. Talend is a commercial open source provider of data integration solutions. With Talend, you can synchronize customer information between Sugar and any other system such as MS Navision or SAP. This greatly simplifies your sales person’s life when it comes to updating customer information. He can simply update the customer’s billing address in Sugar and the change is automatically pushed out to the financials system. They have the Sugar connector built into their Business Connector suite and provide implemenation help as well.  Talend is working with several Sugar customers providing this exact data integration solution today.

Another very cool integration that I saw for the first time is between Starface and SugarCRM. Starface is a very well designed VoIP system that has recently built an extremely cool integration with SugarCRM. When you run Starface for your telephony system and Sugar for your CRM system, your sales people can be working inside of Sugar, a new phone call comes in and the customer record automatically comes up in Sugar. All inbound and outbound phone calls are automatically recorded in Sugar, thereby giving you a very clear and well-organized view of when you talked last with a customer. Like Talend, this is a very real product ready to be installed in your company today.

The Sugar team has recently released ER (entity relationship) diagrams for the Sugar 5.0 database. We will make ER diagrams available with each release moving forward.

The package includes a PDF document and a DDL (data definition language) file that creates the schema with foreign key relationships. You can use the DDL to reverse engineer the diagrams with any diagram tool such as MySQL WorkBench.

You will find the Sugar 5.0 Community Edition ER diagrams here in the Developer Zone. The ER diagrams for the Sugar Professional and Sugar Enterprise Editions are available for subscribers in the download manager at http://support.sugarcrm.com.

As you know, Sugar 5.1 will be our first release where we support only PHP 5 and will drop support for PHP 4. The minimum supported version of PHP for Sugar 5.1 will be PHP 5.1.

With PHP 5.2 now the primary release supported by the PHP team and no more work being done on PHP 5.1, we plan to drop support for PHP 5.1 and require a minimum version of PHP 5.2 with the Sugar 5.5 release targeted at the end of this year. We still support PHP 5.1, but do recommend that you use the latest version of PHP 5.2 as that is proving to be a far more stable PHP release for Sugar to run.

To summarize:

• Sugar 5.0 requires a minimum of PHP 4.4.1, but we recommend PHP 5.2
• Sugar 5.1 will require a minimum of PHP 5.1.0, but again we recommend PHP 5.2
• With Sugar 5.5 at the end of the year, we will require a minimum of PHP 5.2

Onwards and upwards!

I was catching up on the work done at Sun Microsystems around performance testing SugarCRM and MySQL on the Sun Coolthreads server technology.  I see that Satish Vanga, the engineer working on this project, has updated his blog post detailing his performance results and system configuration.  With further tweaking of the MySQL configuration, he has been able to increase the number of concurrent users from 700 to 900.  Very cool!

We have just posted the Sugar Developer Webinar schedule for June.  We have two great deep-dive developer sessions coming up on customizing SugarCRM.

In the Building Dashlets and RSS Feeds session on June 12th, Majed will take you through the details of creating both a Dashlet and an RSS Feed off of a custom-built module.

In the Adding Custom UI Field Types session on June 26th, Max will show you how to create an upgrade safe custom field type which will appear as a new field type choice in Studio and Module Builder.

Sign up now!

We are pleased to announce that the Funambol-SugarCRM Connector Project led by Phil Shotton is the SugarForge Project of the Month for May 2008.  Phil really deserves this award as he truly exemplifies the dedication and passion of a Sugar Open Source Community member and the leadership qualities of a project admin for a top SugarForge project.  Congrats to Phil!

For those of you who haven’t heard of Funambol yet (where have you been hiding?), Funambol is a top-notch technology that allows you to sync contacts, tasks and appointments between various applications and your favorite mobile phone device.  And of course this connector syncs your Sugar customer info with your mobile phone.  Very cool!

On another cool note…  Funambol is just now launching their own Funambol Forge. How long before Phil earns project of the month there as well?  ;^)

We just concluded a survey of the developers in the Sugar Community.  This was our first developer survey and it is always great to get real data to back up what we think the community looks like and wants.  In general we weren’t too surprised with the results, but we were amazed on how consistent the feedback was across the respondents.

The majority of the Sugar Developer Survey respondents are developers using the Community Edition in small companies in North America and Europe and are relatively new to SugarCRM (less than two years).  They almost all have customized the Sugar code and definitely want to see more code comments and better developer documentation.  Though there was some pointed feedback on how to improve the product and documentation (hey, this was their opportunity to say it all) they still rank us very well against other technology vendors, would recommend SugarCRM to others and definitely plan to stick with SugarCRM going into the future.

About 60% of the respondents are running Sugar 5.0, 30% on Sugar 4.5 and the rest on Sugar 4.2 and 4.0.  About 90% are running PHP 5 and 10% PHP 4.  85% are running MySQL and 15% are running MS SQL Server.  2/3rds  are running Linux and 1/3rd are running Windows.  All of the developers use PHP at work, with Java, C++ and Perl being the next most common programming languages.  Standard text editors were the favorite IDE for half the respondents with Eclipse and Zend Studio coming in at 30% and 20%.  3/4ths of the respondents had worked with PHP applications prior to SugarCRM.

The number one request was for better developer documentation.  We are already moving quickly on this with a dev guide in the works.  Stay tuned for a complete update mid-Summer to the Sugar Developer Zone site including all new developer documentation and tutorials.

I’d like to thank everybody who took the time to answer the survey and give us your feedback. In conclusion, expect to see these community-focused surveys more frequently.  Your input drives what we focus on next!

SugarForge.org hit a major milestone last week when the 500th project was registered on the site by Kenneth Thorman with the Open Office SugarCrm plugin project. Brilliant!

It is times like this when it is fun to step back and reflect on the amazing momentum of the SugarCRM community. Can you believe that SugarForge.org is only three years old? I remember in late 2004, early 2005 when the community was asking for a collaboration site where they could focus on just SugarCRM. We really wanted to get the synergy of the Sugar developers focused around one site dedicated to the Sugar community. And so SugarForge.org was launched in March 2005.

Since then, the SugarForge site and the Sugar community have taken off. Not only does SugarForge.org now have 500 projects, but is also coming up on 13,500 registered developers and 4.5 million downloads in the next few weeks. With millions of web page views every month, SugarForge has truly become the focal point of open source CRM development.

So what has happened on SugarForge.org in these past three years?

• 78.1 million web pages viewed
• 4.38 million files downloads
• 13,487 developers registered
• 3,128 different files served

Now that is open source redefining CRM software.

One of our top community members, andopes (199 forum posts in the past month!), has documented in detail in the Sugar Wiki how to configure a Linux system with Zend Core to connect to a MS SQL Server database using the FreeTDS library.

Very cool!