Creating autoincrement custom field

[joshmark]

Hi All!

I'm pretty new to the SugarCRM world and exploring out the possibility of using it in our organization (a NGO) for contact management. Can any one suggest me a way to add an auto increment field in contacts module which I want to use as a unique contact identifier. I want the contact identifier to be human readable as we would be giving these to our contacts.

Please guide me as what will be the best way to do this.

Thanks for all your help.

Joshua

[dtokeefe]

You could just add an autoincrement field to the contacts table, although you might discover that it's better and easier to stick with the existing id field. It would be difficult and pointless to rework Sugar to use auto-increment for ids. Just adding the field and adapting the Contacts class is fairly simple with no major consequences, except for upgrading in the future.

David

[lvangool]

I think it's wiser to leave the existing ID system intact throughout Sugar. Of course, you can still create another field with the human readable ID in it. Since SugarCRM isn't flexible with databases, I would suggest that you just add a custom INT field to the Contacts module and rework the Contacts class to auto increment this ID everytime you add a contact.

[andydreisch]

... Since SugarCRM isn't flexible with databases...

lvangool, can you expand on this? I'm not sure what you mean by this.

Thanks,

Andy

[mycrmspacegunnar]

I think it's wiser to leave the existing ID system intact throughout Sugar. Of course, you can still create another field with the human readable ID in it. Since SugarCRM isn't flexible with databases, I would suggest that you just add a custom INT field to the Contacts module and rework the Contacts class to auto increment this ID everytime you add a contact.

There are two possibilities to create such an autoincrement value.
A) adding the field to the main contacts table
This has the advantage that this number will always and automagiclay by given by the mysql database.
The drawback is that you will NOT see this field in the studio editor and you will need to manually add it to the detail view and edit view.html templates.

B) you can create the field as custom field. You can to this by first creating an simple int field and then changing it with a database tool to autoincement . The advantage of this solution is that you will be able to see and place this field in the studiui editor. The major disadvantage is that the field will NOT reliable be assigned by Sugar and MySQL.
If you create any records that do not contain other customs field (e.g importing data, contacts created by soap) then id field will NOT be created. You will need to alter the Sugar sources to ensure this.

If you really need this field then I would recomment to use option a) and add the field to the main "contacts" table.
You will certainly find manual hacking of the detailview template being much easier than altering the sources of the contacts class.

Cheers
Gunnar