Creating a custom button for Contact Search

[geraldclark]

Hello,

I am new to SugarCRM and I have little PHP background but I am trying to create a custom button in the contacts module. I am not sure how to explain it but I will do my best.

What I would like to happen is for a user to click on the "Contacts" tab and search for a list of contacts. When he has a list of search results to be able to click a button that says "Export Contacts to Webservice". When the button is clicked i would like to generate an array of all the contacts selected from the search and send them to a webservice. Is this possible? I can't seem to find anything on it.

Thanks in advance.

[andopes]

Hi Gerald

It is possible and I believe in a upgrade safe way.

You can create a custom view.list.php for Contacts.
Inside this custom view.list.php you define a new ListView object which extends the ListViewSmarty.
This new ListView object can implement the buildExportLink function, which can render a new button into Pagination. This button can the the one you are talking about.
When clicked in the button can handle all selected elements into mass element and send then to a php script which will send then to a webservice.

Regards

[geraldclark]

Andopes,

Thank you very much for your response. I am still very unsure of what I am doing. I have created the "view.list.php" in my custom\modules\Contacts\views directory. Then I created a new class within the view.list.php file as shown below.

class NewViewList extends listViewSmarty 
{         
    
function NewViewList()        
{  			
parent::listViewSmarty();
}   
		  		   
}

I am unsure of what I do next. do I add a function along the lines of:

function process($file, $data, $htmlVar) 	
{

parent::process($file, $data, $htmlVar) ;
 	        
if (isset($_REQUEST['module']) && ($_REQUEST['module']=='Contacts')
{
$this->ss->assign('WebServiceLink', $this->buildWebServiceLink($this->data['pageData']['offsets']['total']));
}

}

this does not seem to do anything? Do I need to recreate the whole view.list.php file or can i just do
require_once('include/MVC/View/views/view.list.php');?

Currently I am just testing sugar so i went and edited the actual files just to see if i could add another button.

I opened ListViewDisplay.php and added the function

function buildWebServiceLink($totalCount)
{ 
global $app_strings;
$script = '<input class="button" type="button" value="WebService" onclick="">'; 		return $script; 
}

I then went into ListViewSmarty.php and added this to the function process

if($_REQUEST['module']=='Contacts')
{
$this->ss->assign('WebServiceLink', $this->buildWebServiceLink($this->data['pageData']['offsets']['total']));
}

and finally i altered ListViewPagination.tpl to have {$WebServiceLink} below {$composeEmailLink}

this does generate a button but i'm guessing is not upgrade safe. Can you give me a little more detail on this process? Are there any tutorials on this?