What would be the best API to add to Sugar?

[Jacob]

Many times, I find myself wanting to improve the development experience for external developers and module writers. I have gotten feedback from several groups inside and outside of sugar.

One question that I have for all of you out there is:
What would be the best API to add to Sugar?

If you could have one new API written that would make your customizations easier, your module load cleanly, or your system perform better, what would it be?

I look forward to your responses. I will do my best to get the best API suggestion into the 4.5 release.

Thanks,
Jacob

[ruchida]

Jacob,

This may not be a request for API, but just a gadget thing.

I would like to have toolkits of AJAX. They may include those used in SugarCRM like float(drag&drop), inline edit, scheduling, show detail on-mouseover, quick search, etc.

[sophmedia]

Hello,
Well for starters it would be awesome if there was a way we could populate items (such as contacts, cases, etc) into SugarCRM.

For further explanation, I have a Window's Client based billing system that I would like to be able to automatically push my customers over into Contacts/Accounts in SugarCRM. The support is already built into the billing system (Tucow's Platypus for everyone's reference) to do something like this, but I just need some sort of interface (maybe XML based?) that would support this.

Thanks

[Jacob]

In 4.5 we have been massively enhancing our support for AJAX and the number of locations where it is used. Much of this UI is already available for re-use in other portions of the application.

We will be continuing to work on this abstraction and we are contemplating UI widgets that you can use from studio that will leverage AJAX.

Jacob

[Jacob]

Sugar already has a rather extensive SOAP API. We leverage simple XML to be able to get data from the system and write data to the system. This sounds like a perfect match to your needs.

Some documentation on our SOAP API:
http://www.sugarforge.org/frs/downlo...P_Overview.rtf

Jacob

[mbarlow310]

Hi Jacob,

If you want to improve the development experience, the single most important thing I think you could do is offer up some consolidated, organized, and detailed developer documentation.

The developer wiki is a good idea, but it would be even better if it were fleshed out with all the necessary information.

[Jacob]

Point taken.

For what it is worth, I have been adding JavaDoc comments to the SOAP API over the last few weeks. 4.5 will have much better SOAP documentation than it has ever had before.

I am definately spending more time looking into cracking the developer documentation. Stay tuned.

Jacob

[sugarcare]

Are there any SOAP APIs for the Jotpad under 4.5?

[Jacob]

No SOAP APIs for the JotPad....

What kind of control were you thinking of? We have some thoughts along these lines for future releases.

Jacob

[TEST9]

I update this subject because of a two needs which can be very useful :

1 - A complete document about architecture of the database, the files, the processes.
A kind of Bible written in UML with activity or state diagrams (stuff like that).

2 - A way to export in CSV files a list of targets directly from the campaigns, and in an automatic and scheduled way (through the a scheduler job and crontab?)