CandyWrapper 101: Why Use It?

One of my more popular contributions to the SugarCRM community is something I've dubbed CandyWrapper.  If you are not familiar with it, give its project page a look over at SugarForge.org.

The basic premise for its existence is to help minimize the amount of work required to interact with the SugarCRM SOAP API when programming in .NET.  It accomplishes this task by minimizing the amount of code a programmer needs to write in order to interact with the SugarCRM SOAP API.

Second to this, it eliminates the need to know intricacies of the SugarCRM SOAP API.  This is helpful for developers that may be well versed in .NET languages such as C#, but perhaps have never worked with SugarCRM's API.  Rather than having to sift through documentation and tedious trial-and-error scenarios to determine the manner in which the SugarCRM SOAP API expects things, CandyWrapper presents a standard approach and does all the dirty work behind the scenes.

But, exactly what does that mean?  


Let us take a quick look at a C# example to illustrate the advantages of using CandyWrapper.  Within it we will take a look at both the standard C# code one would use without CandyWrapper and of course, we will also look at code that takes advantage of it.  

Our example addresses the common need of logging into SugarCRM via the SOAP API.

First, the standard code, which assumes our web reference to the SugarCRM SOAP API has already been configured with the proper URL.

Standard approach:
private SugarCRM.sugarsoap oSugarCRM = new SugarCRM.sugarsoap();

string sUser = "myuser";

string sPass = "mypassword";

string sVersion = "1.0";

string sAppName = "TestApp";

      

SugarCRM.user_auth oSugarUserAuth = new SugarCRM.user_auth();

SugarCRM.set_entry_result oSugarSetEntryRes = new SugarCRM.set_entry_result();

//getMD5Hash is a custom function 

string sPassHash = this.getMD5Hash(sPass); 

string sResult = string.Empty;

//Define login parameters (user, pass, etc.)

oSugarUserAuth.user_name = sUser;

oSugarUserAuth.password = sPassHash;

oSugarUserAuth.version = sVersion;

oSugarSetEntryRes = oSugarCRM.login(oSugarUserAuth, sAppName);

//Get and return result (Session ID)

sResult = oSugarSetEntryRes.id;

       

return sResult;

Of course, you would probably want to add some additional code to do error checking and the like, but it not necessary for our example.  Now, let us take a look at what you would need to do were using CandyWrapper.  The example assumes CandyWrapper has been added to the project as a reference.

CandyWrapper approach:

CandyWrapper.CandyWrapper oTest = new CandyWrapper.CandyWrapper();

//This line sets the URL for the SOAP web service

int iTemp = oTest.setURL("http://my.url.com/sugarcrm/soap.php"); 

string sSession = oTest.doLogin("myuser", "mypassword", "1.0", "TestApp");

That's it!

Other tasks, such as adding or modifying records, etc. are equally simplified and should help you get up and running faster and reduce the amount of effort required to complete your projects.

So which approach do you prefer?