The Definitive Guide to SugarCRM (eBook)

John Mertic is a software engineer at SugarCRM. He has worked on several areas of the product, namely the Import module, Sugar Wireless, database back ends, and currently themes. He graduated with a bachelor s degree in computer science from Kent State University and has several years of experience with PHP web applications. He has also contributed to many open source projects, most notably the PHP project, for which he is the creator and maintainer of the PHP Windows Installer. He has also authored several articles for PHP Architect, IBM developerWorks, and Apple Developer Connection.

Contents at a Glance 4
Contents 5
About the Author 11
About the Technical Reviewers 12
Acknowledgments 13
Introduction 14
The SugarCRM Platform 15
What Is SugarCRM? 16
The Company 16
The Product 17
The Community 20
Summary 22
MVC Architecture 23
What Is MVC? 23
MVC the Sugar Way 24
Entrypoints 33
What About the Model? 34
Sugar Before MVC 45
Summary 45
Metadata Layer 46
DetailView and EditView 46
How the DetailView and EditView Classes Work 49
Summary 64
Web Services 65
What Are Web Services? 65
Connectors 66
Defining the Fields from the Web Service” 70
Web Services API 74
Custom Web Services 83
Summary 85
More Platform Features 87
User Management 87
Team Management 94
Summary 116
Customizing SugarCRM Out of the Box 117
Easy Customizations Using Studio 118
Starting with Studio 118
Customizing View Templates 122
Summary 132
Workflows and Logic Hooks 133
What Are Logic Hooks? 133
Summary 158
Overriding Existing Code 159
Safety Lies in the Custom Directory 159
Summary 176
Building New Functionality on Top of SugarCRM 177
Using Module Builder to Build Custom Modules 178
Getting Started 179
Summary 200
Building a Custom Module Manually 201
Why Would You Do This? 201
What You Need to Do 202
Summary 223
Designing a Complete Application 224
Summary 253
Index 255