Show field from one module in another

[marcpeterson]

I've been trying advice from the forum and wiki for two days straight without success, so hopefully someone can help me.

I have a custom field in Accounts that I would like to appear in the detailed view of a Contact. Can anyone give me clear, step-by-step instructions on how to do so?

[Superman]

In DetailView.php of Contacts module after you've got $focus->account_id you are able to initialize Accounts object by doing this:

 $account = new Account();
$account->retreive($focus->account_id); 
  

after that do:

 echo "<pre>";
print_r($account);
echo "</pre>"; 
  

look at DetailView screen of Contacts module and see what property you should use to retreive Accounts' custom field.

Does it make sense?

[marcpeterson]

That's good to know, but I should have been more descriptive in my objective.

I'd like to add custom fields from Accounts into Contacts in such a way that they appear in the module editor. By doing it this way, all changes will remain after an upgrade and after a page-publish, right? Everything I've read points to changes in vardefs.php, Contact.php, and DetailView.php but none of my modifications work.

[Superman]

In that case i could see such workaround which would be upgrade safe.

Create custom field in Contacts module which would have preferrably same name as in Accounts.
You will have to create logic hooks (for more info go to SugarWiki) for events in Contacts module "after_retrieve" and "before_save".
"after_retrieve" hook should get custom field from Account module and pass it to Contacts' custom field. So, after you've created such a hook, you are able now from Studio add this custom field to any of the Contacts module screens (detail, edit; not sure about List).
"before_save" hook is needed to write custom field value of contacts module to custom field of accounts module. So you handle custom field storing into Accounts module, and not to Contacts.

Have you got the idea?