With our 5.1 release approaching, one of the features that I was most looking forward to was the revamped Sugar Wireless functionality.  I’m a devoted iPhone user, and I’m usually in need of getting to information in Sugar quickly.. but I don’t want to lug my laptop around with me everywhere I go.

Prior to 5.1, Sugar’s wireless capabilities didn’t provide me with much help as a customer support person, for the simple fact that the Cases module wasn’t exposed.  Sure, I suppose I could have hacked it together at some point in the past, but knowing that we would revamp Wireless eventually, I never got around to it.  Until now!

I spent a few minutes recently seeing how functional Sugar Wireless was for a customer support person….the initial verdict was “not very”.  Yes, Cases are now available, but the absence of Notes is something of a non-starter for companies who are using Sugar Portal to manage their customer interactions (like SugarCRM Inc. ourselves).  The thinking was that Notes were primarily used as a vehicle for file attachments — a decision that I disagree with.  My support engineers use Notes as the most common method of communication with our customers; leaving it out of Wireless cripples our ability to use Wireless.

Would I let that stop me, though?  Of course not!  So I spent a little bit of time over the last couple of days looking into how to customize Sugar Wireless 5.1, and I figured I’d share my findings with the developer community.

(As an aside, I’ll mention here that I haven’t really spent a lot of time understanding MVC and much of the metadata introduced with Sugar 5.0.  I’m not a developer; if I’d filled out Clint’s Developer Survey, I would have called myself a “Fearless Hacker”.  Most of my time spent with my fingers in Sugar’s code dates back before the 5.0 days…)

I set out with the following objectives in mind:

• Modify the Cases views in Wireless to include some custom fields that we rely upon
• Add the Notes module, related to Cases
• Make it all upgrade-safe

There were a few changes that needed to be made to the 5.1 code base in order to support these objectives.  Those changes will be included in the final released version of 5.1, but are not available in 5.1 RC.  Big thanks to SugarCRM software engineer John Mertic for sneaking the necessary changes into Wireless while 5.1 is hunkering down for release.

Customizing the Cases module

First things first, get my custom fields to appear in the Cases module.  Without certain key pieces of information, it would be difficult for a support engineer to glean enough information to do anything useful.

I copied three files from SUGARROOT/modules/Cases/metadata/ to SUGARROOT/custom/modules/Cases/metadata:

• wireless.editviewdefs.php
• wireless.searchdefs.php
• wireless.subpaneldefs.php

Once there, I could edit these files in an upgrade-safe manner, since they’ll override the stock files in SUGARROOT/modules/Cases/metadata.

To wireless.editviewdefs.php, I added lines into the ‘panels’ array, like:

array(’product_category_c’),
array(’sugar_edition_c’),
array(’sugar_version_c’),
array(’deployment_c’),

I also added a line in read-only mode:

array(array(’name’=>’Support_Service_Level_c’, ‘displayParams’=>array(’wireless_detail_only’=>true,)),),

Your field names will most presumably be different than mine, but the rest of the syntax will be the same.

In wireless.searchdefs.php, I added lines into the ‘layout’ array for ‘name’ and ’status’, which would make searching easier.  Especially for ‘name’, or Subject as it would appear through the UI, this is helpful if you don’t know the case number, and Wireless will obey the % wildcard in the search field.

In wireless.subpaneldefs.php, I added this block into the ’subpanel_setup’ array:

‘notes’ => array(
‘order’ => 1,
‘module’ => ‘Notes’,
‘get_subpanel_data’ => ‘notes’,
‘title_key’ => ‘LBL_NOTES_SUBPANEL_TITLE’,
),
More on this later, when we get to adding the Notes module…

Finally, with regards to the Cases module, I wanted to add the Number to the ListView for search results.  Two steps were needed for this:

1)  Create a directory SUGARROOT/custom/modules/Cases/views/ and add a view.wirelesslist.php file to that new directory.  This will allow me to subclass out the main wireless ListView:

require_once(’include/MVC/View/views/view.wirelesslist.php’);

/**
* ViewWirelesslist extends SugarWirelessView and is the view for wireless list views.
*
*/
class CasesViewWirelesslist extends ViewWirelesslist
{
public function display(){
// print the header
$this->wl_header();
// print the select list
$this->wl_select_list();

// check for presence of parent_id — this is the subpanel list view
if (isset($_REQUEST[’parent_id’])){
$this->wl_subpanel_list_view_display();
}
// normal list view display
else{
$this->wl_list_view_display();
}

// display the list view
$this->ss->display(’custom/modules/Cases/tpls/wirelesslist.tpl’);

// print the footer
$this->wl_footer();
}
}

2)  Create a directory SUGARROOT/custom/modules/Cases/tpls/ and copy the file SUGARROOT/include/SugarWireless/tpls/wirelesslist.tpl here, as referenced in the ‘display the list view’ section above.  Then, I built out from this line:

<a href=”index.php?module={$MODULE}&action=wirelessdetail&record={$record.ID}”>{$record.NAME}</a>

To these lines:

{if $MODULE == “Cases”}
<a href=”index.php?module={$MODULE}&action=wirelessdetail&record={$record.ID}”>{$record.CASE_NUMBER}  {$record.NAME}</a>
{else}
<a href=”index.php?module={$MODULE}&action=wirelessdetail&record={$record.ID}”>{$record.NAME}</a>
{/if}

Adding the Notes module

Most of the changes necessary for Notes are upgrade-safe. First was the Cases subpaneldefs, covered above.

Next is creating Wireless metadata files for the Notes module.  Since these were being written from scratch, I copied the following files from SUGARROOT/modules/Calls/metadata/ to SUGARROOT/custom/modules/Notes/metadata:

• wireless.editviewdefs.php
• wireless.searchdefs.php
• wireless.subpaneldefs.php

Then edited those files to replace ‘Calls’ with ‘Notes’.

In wireless.editviewdefs.php:

$viewdefs[’Calls’][’EditView’] = array(

became

$viewdefs[’Notes’][’EditView’] = array(

And equivalent changes in the other two files.

Upgrade-Safe?

Up to this point, everything should be upgrade-safe. Unfortunately, there’s one step that won’t be upgrade-safe…

In the file SUGARROOT/include/MVC/Controller/wireless_module_registry.php, I needed to add Notes to the registry:

‘Notes’ => array(),

[EDIT, August 11, 2008:  John Mertic pointed out to me how to make this step upgrade-safe as well.]

One more change to make, and this one is upgrade-safe as well.  In the directory SUGARROOT/custom/include/MVC/Controller, create a file named wireless_module_registry.php, which will contain this:

<?php

?>
This controls the hyperlinks within the Wireless application to keep your browser within Wireless, instead of going back to the main Sugar application.  Without this step, the links will send you to your main Sugar application, which isn’t optimized for your mobile browser.

Conclusion

All in all, not too painful!  I did my development on a local instance, and tweaked things to the point where I was happy with the appearance, then made my changes in our production instance.  From a testing perspective, you can use your computer’s browser by logging into the mobile interface:

http://YOUR.SUGAR.SITE/index.php?module=Users&action=Login&mobile=1

I hope you find this useful.  If you come up with other ways to extend Sugar Wireless, let’s hear them!