custom constants

[sequoiaben]

Hello,

While customizing sugar, we're finding the need to create some constants that we use in our own custom code. These are mostly the names of various teams, for example:

define('SALES_INBOUND','Sales (Internal) - Inbound');

Right now we have this in config_override.php, however I'm not sure if this is the best place for us to define our constants. Like all our other custom code, I'd like to put this in the /custom folder.

If anyone has experience here and can provide suggestions on where to "correctly" define our custom constants, that would be very much appreciated.

Thanks in Advance,
Ben

[robertbmirth]

This is probably not the 'correct' way to do this, but what I did was I created a custom module for this purpose, i.e. "Custom Settings" or "Custom Control Panel". I then restricted the module to only having one entry (you can do this multiple ways, essentially deleting a record every time one is saved). Every field in this module related to a constant in my code and was accessible by a sql query.

Although this is more for modifiable fields (for example, one is a list of all the phrases we're using for when people manually reply to a newsletter wishing to opt out) it does essentially give the global perspective you're looking for in an upgrade safe manner.

However, there are some shortcomings that make it less than ideal for what you're looking for, as well as for me, so if others have answers to this question I wouldn't mind hearing them as well.

[sequoiaben]

Hello,

Thanks Robert for the recommendation. Just wanted to reply because we found a good solution and this might help someone else in the future. The constant in the example is the name of our outbound sales team.

We did the following:

- added our custom constants into the config table, for example:

 INSERT INTO config (category, name, value) VALUES ('AppSettings', 'outbound_team_name', 'DEFAULT TEAM NAME'); 
  

- created the file: custom/includes/get_constants.php to grab the info from the DB (there might be a more "proper" way to do this). For example:

 function get_sales_outbound_team_name()    {
 
    $administration = new Administration();
    $administration->retrieveSettings('AppSettings');
 
    if(empty($administration->settings['AppSettings_sales_outbound'])) {
        $GLOBALS['log']->error("get_sales_outbound_team_name: sales_outbound constant not found .. you need to run custom/scripts/sql/install_constants.sql");
    }
 
    else {    
        $outbound_team = $administration->settings['AppSettings_sales_outbound'];
        return $outbound_team;
    }
    
} 
  

- we also created custom/scripts/sql/install_constants.php ... which inserts the default constants into the DB.

Thanks,
Ben