Not Best Practices

 - and whomsoever wants to comment Slight smile

We have become aware of an issue with the upgrade to 12.3 reported by a customer. In this case not P1 but pretty close in terms of what was actually done.

The release notes state that in 12.3 the Opportunity fields "Best and Worst fields have been removed from the Opportunities' default layouts in Admin > Studio but can be added back to the layout, if desired.". Our experience is that the "Best" field (actually in use by the customer) has been removed but from a custom layout not just the core one. In this case, in addition, some other (custom) fields also reappeared in the opportunity layout as well, this is being looked at.

It is an exceptionally poor customer experience to be changing a custom layout without warning. This also seems to go completely against SugarCRM's published "upgrade-safe" guidelines. I agree that the field may not be used in core Sugar layouts in a new version but this was a custom layout which means it is there deliberately at the customer's request. Effectively SugarCRM have ignored their own rules and changed a file in the ./custom path when these are documented as being where customers (or partners) make upgrade-safe changes. The release notes do state that the "Best" field is removed from Opportunity layouts but it is perfectly reasonable for customers, partners, developers et al to assume this means from core files only, not from upgrade-safe custom files.

In this instance, the customer was using that field for data collection and display. What happened was that a field they use for key data disappeared and they had to wait until an admin-role person was able to rebuild the layout to restore the field. Until then they were not able to perform their normal duties.

Just to hammer home the point about how poor a customer experience this is: if you were having your car serviced, would you be OK with the mechanic removing the steering wheel as part of the service and then saying "We can put it back for you if you were actually using it - at a cost of course!"?

Whilst on the face of it this may seem a minor gripe, in this case (as with many others) we as partners manage the admin roles in the instance and so it is down to us to make these repair changes. What this means is that we have either a) to charge the customer for the work done to repair SugarCRM's mistake (not acceptable to the customer) or b) do that repair work for free (not acceptable to us).

I'd like to know what others think of this as I see it as a serious breach of the published "upgrade-safe" guidelines.

Rant over (for now!) Wink

JH.

Parents
  • Hi ,

    I'd like to "+1" on 's reply to your comments, he's got it right.

    Sugar can potently change your customizations to that'd prevent upgrades and/or fix syntax or templates through code as part of the customization. We don't do that behind the scenes, it will always be disclosed in our technical customization guides, webinars, and blog posts as much as we can. It's extremely important to follow those channels to keep yourself up-to-date with changes in upcoming releases.

    Now, for your particular Best/Worse Opportunity examples, we are intrigued with what happened and would like to have all the details you can provide us to troubleshoot and investigate on our side. It wasn't supposed to change anything in your 'custom' layout and should've preserved your customizations. Could you open a ticket with support (or request the customer to do so)?

    SugarCRM | Principal Developer Advocate

Reply
  • Hi ,

    I'd like to "+1" on 's reply to your comments, he's got it right.

    Sugar can potently change your customizations to that'd prevent upgrades and/or fix syntax or templates through code as part of the customization. We don't do that behind the scenes, it will always be disclosed in our technical customization guides, webinars, and blog posts as much as we can. It's extremely important to follow those channels to keep yourself up-to-date with changes in upcoming releases.

    Now, for your particular Best/Worse Opportunity examples, we are intrigued with what happened and would like to have all the details you can provide us to troubleshoot and investigate on our side. It wasn't supposed to change anything in your 'custom' layout and should've preserved your customizations. Could you open a ticket with support (or request the customer to do so)?

    SugarCRM | Principal Developer Advocate

Children
  •  and ,

    I fully support your standpoints, we are a professional Sugar partner and we do follow best practices where we can regarding testing and supporting upgrades for our customers. In this case we appear to have missed the fact a field has been removed from a layout. That doesn't change my fundamental point that customised layouts should not be overwritten (not overridden - it also appears the upgrade left no history trail of its actions, if it did it may be more excusable) if they exist. It is stated that Studio-level configuration changes are upgrade-safe (insofar as that can be a thing) and so I am pointing out that this has occurred.

    There is already a ticket open for this and the initial investigations are as Rafael says, that the upgrade was not supposed to touch the custom layout and was only meant to alter default layouts (as it says in the release notes - that is not ambiguous) but it did. Part of that ticket process has stood up a clone of the instance immediately prior to upgrade and we can see that the field was indeed still in the custom layout at that point. So it does appear to be the upgrade process that has silently removed it.

    The post here was for wider comment and to make the issue known to a wider audience as it may affect other layouts and customers. My intention here was to point out this had occurred and I had investigated and found it not to be human error on our or the customers part to remove that field. If I have found there might be a bug in the upgrade process I feel duty bound to let people know in case it affects their work as a developer / customer / partner.

    It appears that the messenger has been shot Disappointed

    Don't worry though, you haven't put me off posting to the forums where I think I can help Slight smile

    Thanks,

    JH.