Populate new Opportunity via external program

[dholmes]

I'm looking to populate a new Opportunity with data from an external program. Basically, we have an Excel sheet that's filled out for each Opportunity at a customer's site. We want to take some of the data from that Excel sheet and create and Opportunity with it.

Reading the data from the Excel file is no problem - I can pull all of the necessary fields that we're looking for from the sheet just fine. I'm just getting stuck on how exactly to go about adding that to an EditView of an Opportunity without having an entry in the database. I want all of the relevant data shown on the screen for the user - they just need to pick the account that fits the Opportunity and then save it and go. Anyone have any pointers for how to go about doing this? The only thing I can come up with is to make some sort of temporary entry into the Opportunity table and pull that with EditView, but that seems rather hacky.

[swhitlow]

Not sure which thing you are wanting here. But, I will give it a shot:

#1. If you are wanting to populate data from an Excel spreadsheet into SugarCRM regularly - I would look into a JitterBit/SOAP solution. Using Jitterbit to tie the Excel spreadsheet data to the WSDL endpoints of the SOAP connection. Then, building a small class to use SugarSOAP to actually insert the data into the Opportunity. You can read more about SOAP on the developer Wiki.

#2. If you are just wanting some of the Excel data present on the Opportunities module, I would simply ditch the Excel spreadsheet and start using custom fields in Sugar Studio and start editing away. Pretty soon, you will not need the Excel spreadsheet at all.

I guess the main line above that was confusing for me was the "adding that to an EditView of an Opportunity without having an entry in the database" line. Just not sure about what you mean here.

[fedepia]

you could use set_entry web service
here you can find info about this
http://www.sugarcrm.com/wiki/index.p...tical_Examples

[dholmes]

The initial goal was going to be to use the internal Sugar Opportunity module to allow some of the functionality - but I think I'm going to have to go the SOAP route.

Just in case, the workflow of what I was wanting to do:
1. Excel sheet is filled out at a customer's site. I know that this could be set up within Sugar, but there are quite a few other things going on in the Excel sheet that we don't want to move to Sugar (just yet)
2. Salesperson goes to a module within Sugar and uploads the Excel sheet.
3. Using PHP and some other tools, parse the Excel sheet and extract the information we're looking for.
4. Present that information in a nearly-filled-out Opportunity form with a lot of custom fields that hold the data - just get the sales user to select an account and fill in a couple of other options and submit.

It's getting the information from the Excel data array into an Opportunity that I was stuck on - and don't see any easy way through.

Thanks to everyone for the help, though. I'm going to investigate the SOAP route and see what I can come up with. I'll probably just host that somewhere and add it as a Portal tab as an option.

[eggsurplus]

If I understand you correctly this is already in Sugar. Under Opportunities you can import opportunities in a number of formats. With Excel you just save it as a CSV then import that.

[dholmes]

If I understand you correctly this is already in Sugar. Under Opportunities you can import opportunities in a number of formats. With Excel you just save it as a CSV then import that.

If it were a simpler spreadsheet that would be a more viable option, but it's huge, complicated and getting to a point of exporting to CSV, then importing again just adds more steps into the process that sales can manage to make mistakes on. I'm trying to work towards a one-shot solution on this particular problem, unfortunately. Plus there are some additional things that will need to be selected that won't be on the Excel file but will be required in the Opportunity.