Be advised of a bug with Saluation field that can occur in SOAP calls

[SugarDev.net]

Hi all,

Just wanted to post info about something that cost me my Sunday night:

I used a SOAP client to connect to SugarCRM, to get Contact information. This client gave problems retrieving the list of Contacts. It gave an Null Reference (sort of a NullPointer) error (it's a .NET client)

Now, this client is closed source so my options for debugging were limited. I luckily found some ways it works, and some way it wouldn't. So I started testing possible causes. I tested the program with only a single record in the database and with a few, etc.

After a few hours I was positive that this was an data issue, not code. Because the database contents predicted the success or failure of the SOAP call. Now, it appears that a dash ("-") sign in the KEY component of a dropdown DOM causes Sugar UI to work perfectly, but really screws up SOAP actions.

I had this code:

 $GLOBALS['app_list_strings']['salutation_dom']=array (
  '-blank-' => '',
  'Dr.' => 'Dr.',
  'Prof.' => 'Prof.',
  'MSC' => 'MSc',
  'BSc' => 'BSc',
  'LLB' => 'LLB',
  'LLM' => 'LLM',
  'MBA' => 'MBA',
  'BBA' => 'BBA',
  'RA'  => 'RA',
); 
  

..overriding the salation dom. The first line key "-blank-" caused all problems!!! Replacing '-blank-' with '' and setting all records to salutation = null fixed the problem.

 UPDATE <table> SET salutation = NULL; 
  

What have we learned?
SugarCRM's SOAP server component cannot handle dashes in dropdown keys.

What to do?
Modify Studio to reject dashes. Modify developer documentation to warn about problems when using dashes.

Now I already was pro-INT keys for dropdowns before all this. This is another reminder to myself to use just NUMBERS for dropdown keys...so I have myself to blame I suppose.

[clint]

I created bug 25717 to track this issue.

[SugarDev.net]

Thnx clint. I have a possible fix:

The maker of the program gave me a possible fix:

The function function get_field_list(&$value, $translate=true){ Defined in soap\SoapHelperFunctions.phpI recommend you to encode the option name in line 68:

$options_ret[] = get_name_value($key,$oneOption);

Something like this should do the trick:

$options_ret[] = get_name_value(htmlspecialchars($key),$oneOption);

Also: please check out Sugar Bugs. I cannot add any Notes (it says "Note saved" but I don't see the note).

[SugarDev.net]

I've tested this and it seems to work!

I have another request Clint: The Salutation field is a varchar of length 5. "-blank-" didn't fit in there and i wasn't aware of it, and this caused another way in which a key value is not known (because they were all stored as "-blan" in the database). I worked under the assumption that all dropdown fields are 255 long (as are all Studio created dropdown fields). Personally I will be using integers (1 - 99999) for keys in future versions of my modules, so I won't really care about this, but I wanted to inform you anyway.

[clint]

Also: please check out Sugar Bugs. I cannot add any Notes (it says "Note saved" but I don't see the note).

Looking into it.