My Two Rules of Logic Hooks

As you may have ascertained from prior posts, something about the logic hooks feature really draws my attention.  I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that the main limit on its capabilities is one's creativity and that power is quite appealing.


Regardless of the reason or the intended purpose of the logic hook, there are a couple of rules that I've learned one should always adhere to in order to avoid problems.


Curious about what they are?  Keep reading.

At The Top Of The List...

As you might have already guessed, a large part of my day-to-day CRM consulting work involves me asking questions.  Here is a small sampling of some common ones:

• Where do you store your leads?
• How are you tracking your sales?
• Can you describe your marketing processes?

This line of questioning helps me get a better grasp on the intended goals for the CRM implementation.  I then translate this information into functionality contained within software packages such as SugarCRM and voila! we have a CRM system.


Conversely, clients tend to also present a wide range of questions and covering a variety of topics, some more technical than others, but all equally interesting.  One question in particular that I often times encounter is the following:


Which CRM system is best?

SugarCRM Cookbook: .NET and Dates

A user of my CandyWrapper library recently requested some help addressing a problem they were experiencing with the insertion of dates into SugarCRM via C#.


After some investigation, I identified the source of the problem was the format in which the date was being submitted to the SugarCRM SOAP API.  


The interaction reminded me of the frequency at which this particular problem appears within the SugarCRM Forums.  Its actually rather understandable as there isn't much documentation covering the subject.  


If you are also a C# developer, the code snippet that solved the problem is provided below:

01 DateTime dtTemp = System.DateTime.Now;
02 dtTemp = TimeZone.CurrentTimeZone.ToUniversalTime(dtTemp);
03 string sDate = String.Format("{0:yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss}", dtTemp);


This is the standard way in which I handle dates in my C# projects, but there is a special twist to my code which is worth highlighting and might help save you some additional frustration in your projects.


Let us analyze it, line by line.