SugarCRM: Related Data Interactions

Often times a customization we are working on requires us to interact with related data, usually records that are children of another. For example, a customization might require us to determine if a given Account record has 1 or more related Contacts. Or for that matter, we may need the collection of ID values that represent all the Calls linked to a Contact.

In either example, the path most often followed could be described with the following pseudo-code:

1. Instantiate the parent SugarBean object (e.g. Account/Contact record object)
2. Load the corresponding relationship to access the related data objects
3. Retrieve the related SugarBean objects representing the related objects

See below for a PHP snippet illustrating the above:

	<?php
	//Some other code
	//Instantiate parent record SugarBean object
	$ParentBean = BeanFactory::retrieveBean('Accounts', 'some_account_id_value');
	//Load the pertinent relationship using Link field name
	$ParentBean->load_relationship('contacts');
	//Retrieve related Contact(s) SugarBean object(s)
	$RelatedContacts = $ParentBean->contacts->getBeans();
	//The rest of our code

view raw relatedData.php hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Line 12 in the above example would effectively create an array of SugarBean objects representing the linked Contacts. From that point forward, determining whether or not the Account has any linked Contacts becomes a simple matter of checking the size of the array. 

For the linked Calls example, the code would be very similar, except we would load the 'calls' relationship and the ID values we want would be in the SugarBean object array that results from executing the getBeans() method.

Now, all of the above would function just fine, but let us consider a few things about this approach.