Help in design ...

[madhrishi]

Hi,

We need to capture 'n' number of instances where a donor has donated to our organization. There are many regular donors and we are not sure what should be the value of 'n'. However, restricting it to 20 instances...

We capture,

1) Donation Date
2) Amount
3) Purpose [DropDown]
4) Receipt No

How do i do this in an efficient manner?
Edit/Detail and search views look hugely ugly if i have 20 * 4 fields ....

1) Should i go for something like "email" field option, where more emails appear on the click of a '+' sign ??
If so, How do i achieve this??

OR

2) Do i create them as 'Activities/Tasks' with respect to the contact ??

OR

3) Is there a better solution/way to implement this??

Kindly help....

Thanks!

[roblaus]

This is very easy:

Create a new module in Module Builder. Call it donations. Just use the basic template and don't do anything else with it. Publish and install via the module loader.

Then in Studio go to contacts (assuming your donors are persons and not companies). Add a 1:n relationship to your newly created module. You have to repeat this process for companies if you receive donations from people as well as from organizations.

Go to your donations module and enrich it with the fields you need (you may do this in Module Builder but I personally prefer to do it afterwards)

Run a quick repair and that's it.

[madhrishi]

Thanks Roblaus...

This was our first plan... but after implementation, we found "inter-module" search was an issue.... Also
how will i export records?

i.e : if there are 20 donations by one contact, how to export this info alone with the contact information??

[roblaus]

Export is no issue because it works the same way as everywhere else (there should be the button "export" on top of your donations list view).
With inter module search you mean the global search in the top right corner? This also should work but needs a small tweak. Need to look it up.

PS: to export donations for one contact add the contact to your search panel and search for this particular one. Export the result.

[matthew]

Regarding search, if you need to, you can likely modify modules/Home/UnifiedSearchAdvanced.php if necessary.

[madhrishi]

i m still not clear about the export one...

I have 100 Contacts who have donated.... These are 2 different modules.... Now if i export contacts separately and donations separately, How will i know which donation is for which contact? To match them manually after exporting with some unique identifier is really painful...

To search for each contact from donations module and exporting one by one is also too much work...

Is there no way i can have All contacts and their corresponding donations at one shot?? [given these are different modules]

Thank You.

[matthew]

The best way to do this on the export for both modules would be to do a SQL query where you join the donations records to the matching contact records. phpMyAdmin would allow you to then run that query and export it as a CSV or XLS file.

There's no way to join modules in exports with Sugar CE. However, if you're using Professional or Enterprise, you can export reports that you create. No SQL necessary!

[roblaus]

You are not talking export but reporting. This is, as Matthew pointed out correctly, solved nicely in Pro/Ent. But there are countless other possibilities. You can use phpmyadmin, sqlyog or open office base (which is actually cool because you can directly get your results into calc). Or you can use any other reporting/BI tool - Talend, Crystal, Pentaho, Jasper just to name a few. And if you want to do it directly from within Sugar there is still ZuckerReports.

[madhrishi]

Thanks a lot...

[Greetal]

As Roblaus says, using a BI tool like Talend Open Studio is a good option.
Talend Open Studio is an open source ETL tool for data integration and migration experts.
For more information: http://www.talend.com/