SugarCRM Cookbook: Retrieving User Roles

One of the challenges relating to the adoption of any new technology is understanding the manner in which one accomplishes equivalent tasks based on our experience with previous versions of the same technology. Sugar 7 is no exception to this rule, and this challenge is perhaps its biggest within the development community.

With that in mind, lets talk about a recent situation I came across that very much speaks to this point. In short, in the course of talking about the 7.x technology, the question arose of how one would go about retrieving a list of Roles assigned to a given user. Because we have to do this through a JavaScript based controller, techniques we might have used in the past are no longer applicable.

For the purposes of our example we will assume that we wish to retrieve the list of Roles assigned to the currently logged in user, in turn allowing us to see some details about the manner in which we interact with the current user, also a common need and one that also differs greatly. 

The following Gist will allow us to retrieve the Roles:

	/* Author: Angel Magaña - cheleguanaco@cheleguanaco.com
	*
	* This Gist can be used within a Sugar 7 Controller to retrieve a user's
	* security Roles
	*
	*/
	/* To retrieve the Roles, we create a User object then
	* retrieve the User's related Role records via the default Users <--> Roles relationship
	*/
	var user = app.data.createBean('Users', {id: app.user.id}); //the JSON object contains the ID of the record to load
	user.fetch(); //this retrieves the record from the Users module with the ID specified in the JSON object
	//this retrieves the related records for the previously loaded User record, using the 'link' name (from vardefs)
	var user_roles = user.getRelatedCollection('aclroles');
	user_roles.fetch({relate:true});
	// At this point, user_roles.models represents all the Role records associated with the given user, in this case, the current user

view raw UserRoles.js hosted with ❤ by GitHub

NOTE: Roles are only accessible to Admin level users and as such, the above code would only function if executed by a user with Admin privileges. In turn, it would also be best to specify a particular user ID rather than relying on the current user.