Send email to Contact when a Case is created

[MichaelRLevy]

I'm a PHP programmer, but am new to SugarCRM. I'm using Open Source 4.5.1e. I'm just starting to learn about the SOAP API, custom hooks, and Sugar beans.

I've written web forms (outside SugarCRM) that allows a person to create one or more research requests. The person's contact information goes into a Sugar Contact, and each research request goes into a Case. My app then uses SOAP and creates the Contact and Case(s) and links them together in SugarCRM.

I've made a custom hook on the Case, and it gets invoked when each Case is created. It's working and I can, for example, log the $bean->contact_id value associated with the Case.

Now, the hard part. I need to do the following in the logic hook:

(a) compose a customized email confirmation for the user that contains the Contact's information and the Case
(b) send the email from SugarCRM in such a way that it's attached to the Case

I think I could figure out how to do a sql query to get the Contact information. But at this point I don't know anything about how to send email (other than to a user). Thanks in advance!

[julian]

Hello MichaelRLevy,

First off, I'm moving this thread to the Developers forum, where you'll get some more relevant answers.

Instead of doing a direct SQL query to retrieve Contact information, I suggest you instantiate a Contact object, ala:

 require_once('modules/Contacts/Contact.php');
$contact = new Contact();
$contact->retrieve($bean->contact_id); // you now have access to all the Contact information in this object 
  

If you want an Email record attached your Case, you'll need to create it first. The process is similar:

 require_once('modules/Emails/Email.php');
$email = new Email();
 
$email->case_id = $bean->id;
$email->body = "...";
// etc. etc. etc.
 
$email->save(); 
  

You'll need to check the properties of the Emails module and figure out which fields are required. Last, you'll need to check the code that normally sends Emails and transplant that into your logic hook.

Let me know if you run into any problems! Good luck,