add contacts from a remote script

[blesone]

hello all,

i am attempting to add a contact to my sugarCRM database outside of the sugarCRM gui...

i am able to connect to the database, and all the information seems pretty straight forward... the only thing i dont understand is that the "id" of each entry in the contacts table (inside of mySQL database) looks pretty complex.

does anyone know a.) why that id is so complex and where its used... and b.) if i just generate a simple id... or change the properties of that mysql field to be an auto_incrementing primary key, will it be okay?

thanks in advance

joe

[cywolf]

The ID is generated by the create_guid() function in include/utils.php, and is meant to be unique within the database. I believe this is so that an object can be given an ID before being inserted into the database, instead of having to save the object and then determine what ID it was assigned.

If you're inserting the data from a PHP script, just include and use the same method to create your IDs. Otherwise it's fine to put whatever ASCII character data you like in there (up to 36 characters), as long as you can generate unique values. But I don't think simply changing the column to an auto-incrementing field would be satisfactory.