Calling a webservice as part of a Process Author workflow?

Question

Hello!

I'm quite new to SugarCRM. I'm trying to see if the Process Author (aka Advanced Automation) would work for us. When a lead is promoted to an account, I'd like to call an internal webservice to do additional work - such as provision a demo account, etc. I was looking at the "actions" widget within Process Author, and the action types include: Business Rule, Assign User, Round Robin, Change Field, and Add Additional Field. Business rules seem like reusable chunks of logic, so those probably aren't it.

Should I be looking at logic hooks instead? If so, is there a way to trigger a logic hook from the Process Author? (I hope that makes sense!)

Thanks!

Bret

Bret Truchan · Accepted Answer

In general calling external services can be done with web logic hooks which can be set up in Admin > Web Logic Hooks:

http://support.sugarcrm.com/Documentation/Sugar_Versions/7.7/Ult/Administration_Guide/System/Web_Logic_Hooks/

However this will just send the object of the record in oder to process it on the external side. It might work with that for your usecase but as you have special conditions in place a logic hook might be more effective here. I can see two other options:

1.) Extending the convert lead classes of ./modules/Leads/clients/base/api/LeadConvertApi.php in custom/ directory

http://support.sugarcrm.com/Documentation/Sugar_Developer/Sugar_Developer_Guide_7.6/API/Web_Services/Extending_Web_Servi…

2.) Creating an after_save logic hook on Leads that checks if it is getting converted and if so sends a request with the parameters to your external service. You should be able to determine if the Lead is converted from the request:

$action = $_REQUEST['action'];

if ($action == 'ConvertLead')

http://support.sugarcrm.com/Documentation/Sugar_Developer/Sugar_Developer_Guide_7.7/Architecture/Logic_Hooks/Module_Hook…

Hope that works for your scenario!

- Dennis