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:

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. 

SugarCRM Troubleshooting: SugarCRM 7 Installs

Wow! - That was my initial reaction when I first saw early versions of SugarCRM 7.0 (Sugar 7) a little over a year ago. It reminded me of how impressed I was the first time I saw Sugar in its 3.0 days.

Fast forward to today and a lot of folks have had a chance to experience the same. New customers utilizing the SugarCRM OnDemand environment have had access to 7.0 for a few months. More recently, new on-premise customers utilizing classic LAMP stacks have also been able to take advantage of all the great new features in 7.0. 

As the with any new software release, as it gets exposed to greater quantity of users, certain patterns emerge relating to common problems users encounter. Sugar 7 is no exception. 

Perhaps the most common issue in the 7.0 world today is one where the install procedure completes without error, but after completion, the Sugar login page never displays. In its place, users will see the following:

It would seem Sugar never stops loading because the message never goes away. This is actually not far from the truth, but fortunately, there is a very simple fix to this problem. Before we look at the solution, it is worth briefly discussing the nature of the problem, as it is directly related to an important change that has been introduced into the Sugar architecture.

A Tale of Two Maxes

A few days ago an odd error message experienced by a SugarCRM user made its way to my desk. After scratching my head for a few minutes, some ideas for its source came to mind and the problem was corrected. 

Soon thereafter, a similar scenario once again made its way to me, but the conditions causing the error seemed a bit different. Fortunately, both scenarios resulted in similar errors and the solution for the prior scenario was equally applicable to the latter.

This is the error, extracted from the sugarcrm.log file:

MySQL error 1439: Display width out of range for column '<some_field_name>' (max = 255)

So what is this error telling us? The error is telling us that the referenced field cannot be created because its definition indicates a desired width larger than 255. In this particular case, it was an integer field, which in turn translates to a field that can hold more than 255 digits. Note that this a reference to the number of individual digits the field can hold, or its width, not the maximum value it can hold. This brings us to the crux of the problem.