SugarCRM Customization: Employees Relate Field

The topic of Employees and Users within the scope of SugarCRM can sometimes be a bit confusing. However, there are a couple of subtle points that help distinguish the two. 


In a nutshell, Employees are a representation of the various individuals that work at your organization. In some cases (maybe all), those same individuals are also SugarCRM users, but it is not mandatory. Users, on the other hand, are a representation of all the individuals that have access to the SugarCRM system. Note that anyone defined as a User is also automatically added to the Employees list -- which is often the reason why confusion creeps in when discussing this topic.


Another important difference between the two is that of the two, data can only be assigned to a User but not to an Employee. These subtle differences are specially important on commercial deployments (Professional, Enterprise Editions) as User counts are limited by the number of licenses one has purchased. 


But what happens if one had a need to assign data to an Employee, for reference purposes?  


Say for example that we are using the Bug Tracker module to log product flaws, but the developers that are responsible for handling them are not SugarCRM users. 


Normally one would address these scenarios by simply accessing the Studio customization tool and creating a relate field in the corresponding module, related to the module containing the data from which one will pick an entry. In this example, following this logic would lead us to want to create a relate field on the Bug Tracker module, and relate the field to the Employees module.


Were one to try it, one would notice that the Employees module is not a choice for the relate field properties, thus, it is not possible -- at least via Studio.


To create this type of field we need to define it via manual changes to the Bug Tracker module. In this particular case, it is a modification to the module's structure, and will be added to the vardefs.ext.php file.    


So, what do we need to put into the vardefs.ext.php file? Here it is:



<?php


$dictionary["Bug"]["fields"]["assigned_employee_c"] = array (
      'required' => false,
      'source' => 'non-db',
      'name' => 'assigned_employee_c',
      'vname' => 'Employee',
      'type' => 'relate',
      'massupdate' => 0,
      'comments' => '',
      'help' => '',
      'importable' => 'true',
      'duplicate_merge' => 'disabled',
      'duplicate_merge_dom_value' => '0',
      'audited' => false,
      'reportable' => true,
      'calculated' => false,
      'len' => '255',
      'size' => '20',
      'id_name' => 'employee_id_c',
      'ext2' => 'Employees',
      'module' => 'Employees',
      'rname' => 'name',
      'quicksearch' => 'enabled',
      'studio' => 'visible',
);


$dictionary["Bug"]["fields"]["employee_id_c"] = array (
      'required' => false,
      'name' => 'employee_id_c',
      'vname' => '',
      'type' => 'id',
      'massupdate' => 0,
      'comments' => '',
      'help' => '',
      'importable' => 'true',
      'duplicate_merge' => 'disabled',
      'duplicate_merge_dom_value' => 0,
      'audited' => false,
      'reportable' => true,
      'calculated' => false,
      'len' => 36,
      'size' => '20',
);


?>

Next, save the vardefs.ext.php file we just created within the following directory:

custom/Extension/modules/Bugs/Ext/Vardefs/

Now we need to perform a repair in order to instruct SugarCRM to apply these changes. This is accomplished via Admin > Repair > Quick Repair and Rebuild. The process will prompt us to click Execute to apply the field. Proceed to do so to finalize the change.

After the repair process successfully finishes, proceed to use the Studio tool to add the Employee field to the EditView and any other relevant layouts and deploy the changes. 

If all went well, the Employee relate field should now be functional. Assuming the field was added to the EditView, one can test it by creating a new Bug. Give it a try.