There will also be a follow-up article to go with it – showing some code examples, because sometimes its easier to think of things when they are written down.
SugarCRM can’t talk to PHP 5 native SOAP libraries in WSDL mode, so connect without it. Find below a series of queries that each worked for me, all just dumped here in succession, don’t try to run this whole piece of code – it is intended as a series of examples. Use each line and then var_dump($response) to see what’s happening.
// set up options array
$options = array(
"location" => 'http://192.168.1.129/aeat/spm/crm/soap.php',
"uri" => 'http://www.sugarcrm.com/sugarcrm',
"trace" => 1
);
// connect to soap server
$client = new SoapClient(NULL, $options);
// look what modules sugar exposes
$response = $client->get_available_modules($session_id);
// look in more detail at the fields in the Accounts module
$response = $client->get_module_fields($session_id, 'Accounts');
// look for a particular account name and then get its ID
$response = $client->get_entry_list($session_id, 'Accounts', 'name like "%LornaJane%"');
$account_id = $response->entry_list[0]->id;
// create a new account record and grab its ID
$response = $client->set_entry($session_id, 'Accounts', array(
array("name" => 'name', "value" => 'New Company')
));
$account_id = $response->id;
// create a new contact record, assigned to this account, and grab the contact ID
$response = $client->set_entry($session_id, 'Contacts', array(
array("name" => 'first_name',"value" => 'Geek'),
array("name" => 'last_name',"value" => 'Smith'),
array("name" => 'email1',"value" => '[email protected]'),
array("name" => 'account_id',"value" => $account_id)
));
$contact_id = $response->id;
I hope this helps – if you have anything to add, or would like to post some examples, please do :)
The first thing to note is that the SOAP API for SugarCRM is advertised as being incompatible with the PHP 5 SOAP client implementation, and they recommend you use nusoap. However this isn’t true and I found it worked fine with PHP 5 in non-WSDL mode.
The second thing to note is that the documentation is rubbish. The best I could find is on their developer wiki and it isn’t enough to write an application with. I had to do a fair amount of fiddling around on the server side to understand when I was making mistakes which isn’t ideal for remote system calls! They do, however, have very good inline documentation so I ran PHPDocumentor over the file which had the stuff I was dealing with in it. I can’t find an equivalent online so you can see my copy over here
Also if you go to your own sugar installation and append /soap.php to the URL, you will see some information there about formats plus a link to the WSDL. The WSDL isn’t very human-readable but the top bit of it defines the custom data formats like “name_value_list” and shows you how to assemble them to submit to SOAP. If I can work out a good way of presenting that information I’ll add it somewhere and link to it.
There will also be a follow-up with the script that worked for me. If this helps, or you have any questions, then add a comment please :)
Today I attempted to create custom fields for the first time, which should have been much easier than it was. The first problem was that all the tutorials deal with earlier versions of Sugar and the interface has changed. The second problem was that I kept on getting lots of errors when I tried to create a custom field. The errors were Javascript errors but when I looked in my apache error log there were lots of these:
PHP Warning: LanguageManager::include(cache/modules/ModuleBuilder/language/en_us.lang.php) [function.LanguageManager-include]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in .../include/SugarObjects/LanguageManager.php on line 91, referer: ...
index.php?module=ModuleBuilder&action=index&type=studio
On closer inspection I realised the cache directory was empty. I made this writeable by the apache user and everything started working after that.
Here’s a very quick run through on the steps that I followed. From the home screen, go into the admin section and then click on “Studio”. In the left-hand pane, expand the folder for the module you want to add things to and click on “Fields”. At this point you should read the help entries in the right hand screen but for the impatient: Click on “Add Field”, enter the field details and click on “Save”. The field name gets saved with a suffix of “_c” and should appear in the central pane under “custom”. If it doesn’t, see above for my comments about the cache directory.
The new field needs to be added to the layout before you will see it – this seems to fool a lot of people and I must admit I would have missed this myself if I hadn’t read it on the forums. Once you have created your field, go back to the tree view on the left and choose which layouts you’d like to be able to see your field in. Again there is help on the right hand panel but basically you drag the “new row” thing from the left hand column in the central panel to the right hand column in the central panel, and then drop your new field on top of it.
Hope this helps, its taken me quite a while to get to grips with what should be fairly simple. I’ll add a final note to say that the custom fields are available through the SOAP API – just remember their names get suffixed with a “_c”.
Operation 'getFunctions' is not defined in the WSDL for this service
After spending quite a long time trying to get the client to realise it wasn’t supposed to be using a WSDL, I realised I had mistyped the name of the function and what the error message actually meant was “this function does not exist”. Hopefully I’ll remember next time I see the same problem, hopefully by putting it here it might also help someone else too.
Recently I’ve been reminded that actually people make software that you can’t just dip into, that you have to buy. This is partly because I now work for Ibuildings and we’re Zend Partners – so all of a sudden I have access to lots of Zend products that I haven’t had reason to play with before. I also have a new work laptop that came with Windows Vista, which was less horrifying to use that I’d feared, and nothing like as good as I’d hoped. I’m sure half of the problem is that I really haven’t used windows for a long time, and its quite hard to find your way around unless you’re used to doing things that way.
The very idea of paying for software feels new … it isn’t, of course, but its been so long since I had anything that didn’t come out of my linux package manager, or from sourceforge that it really caught me by surprise. A lot paid-for software is easy to make points against – its proprietary, closed softare, or the same thing could be achieved by free equivalents. Which is true but if you’re not actually going modify the code or use the contributions of a wider community, it probably doesn’t matter. And if you aren’t going to install, set up, and glue together one or more free products, then the paid-for version is probably more up your street. On the whole, there are definitely situations where I can see the point of paying for a better-packaged version, or one that combines one or more functions, or offers support.
Then there’s the aspect that commercial software comes with salesmen and things – there’s a lot to be said on both sides! I’m not sure I’ll be putting my hand in my own pocket for software any time soon, but working with new products is interesting and I find I really would recommend some of them to others. I’d love to hear others’ feelings on this topic as well!
This version of PHP is the default one that comes with this version, 5.2.3. Check you have installed the php5-common package from aptitude as this includes the pdo.so file. If you check phpinfo you should see that PDO is listed as a module although you don’t have any drivers.
Then you should do:
sudo aptitude install php5-mysql
Restart apache and check its error log in case there are any problems. Then simply refresh your phpinfo page and pdo_mysql should be listed.
For earlier versions of ubuntu/kubuntu have a look at this excellent tutorial from theatons, I followed this but its slightly out of date now which is why I’ve posted an update. Most of the rest of the tutorial is still correct though.