Sugar 5.0b, SOAP API, acquiring a contact by email address

[ragaskar]

I'm absolutely bewildered about how to go about the straightforward task of maintaining a record via SOAP.

Essentially, I am generating leads via a form that uses the SOAP api to communicate with the SugarCRM install. In order to do this I need to retrieve lead ids via email. Since the contact_by_email func has been deprecated (and doesn't work), is it possible to get module ids via email or not?

This needs to be compatible with leads entered manually, so using a custom field is no help because then I need to make sure all people entering leads manually also populate the custom field.

Its nice that there is now the possibility to add multiple email address per user, but not being able to retrieve a user id via the email address means there's no way for me to tell if I have an existing record of the lead -- if there's one thing that establishes identity online, it is your email address. Matching on name is absolutely worthless in any situation where you expect more than a couple hundred users.

Is there something I'm missing philisophically with the way SugarCRM works? Should I be going about this in another manner?

Again, to be clear, what I"m trying to do:

1. Search module for existing email
2. If email exists, do process X
3. If email does not exist, add record.

I'm having trouble with step 1 -- it does not seem possible.

[ragaskar]

Well, it looks like the 'search_by_module' operation will work for this purpose -- at first glance it seemed a little heavier weight than I needed, but it appears to fit in with the core ideas behind sugarCRM, so that's good enough for me.

i guess the only weirdness now is figuring out the behavior that needs to happen if a user comes in through the lead generator with an email address that exists in a module other than Leads.