How to show meetings in every Invitee related Accounts Subpanel

Hello,

Showing grandchildren can be tricky in Sugar :) AFAIK there's no out of the box way to do it. We're currently evaluating various solutions (fully custom subpanel or aditional relatinship) as 2 of our significant clients have requested this. 

I'd be happy to hear about other SugarCRM partners too :)

Cheers,

Damien

My first instinct would be a custom Dashlet in the Intelligence Pane of the Account Detail View.

You can use a custom API to build the content: loop through the Contacts related to the Account and for each Contact get and display the Meetings that that contact is a participant of.

You can choose to organize/group the data by Meeting (date, list of participants) or by Contact (which may duplicate meetings if more than one person from this Account attended). I would probably choose the latter and allow the user to filter by date so you don't pull in years of historical data that may not be so relevant.

Keep in mind that the dashlets load regardless of whether your Intelligence Pane is open (I wish they would pull only when that particular dashboard is opened), so the loading of the record could be somewhat slower depending on how you build the dashlet, how much data you pull in etc...

By pulling this data into a Dashlet you can also make sure that it's loaded only for those people who really want/need to see it. Others will simply not add that dashlet to their view.

I'll be interested in seeing the solution you come up with.

FrancescaS

Hello Francesca 

I'm working within the same company with Damien, as he already told we though about some kind of solutions to answer this need.

The first one is about creating a custom API that will loop through the contacts / opportunities (and other objects) that are related to a customer, and address them in a custom subpanel that is easy to build, readonly view as we will only display the information. The only thing we can add will be the order on the columns.

The second thing and the one that is more tricky is to add hooks that will monitor when a meeting is added to a contact, retrieve the customer if exists and add a link between the customer and the meeting. We have to do this job on every cases (modify relationship, delete relationship), and on several modules (contacts, opportunities, etc ...). This will be annoying and very hard to maintain. We proposed the first solution to our customer.

Yours will be fine too, the advantage is that a person that don't want this dashlet didn't add to his dashboard.

Any other point of view will be good to hear :-)

Best regards,

Enes

Hi Francesca,

That was one of our ideas too. 

The drawback of dashlets is that they are not visible in the mobile application AFAIK. It's also a deviation from the standard usability of the app. 

We should petition the editor to include that feature as standard, altough in some of our cases the contact-account relationship is enriched (contact role). 

Thanks for the suggestions, Francesca. These are interesting approaches, but they do not take into account the point of the app. Unfortunately, the suggestion for improvement came from a department that also needs to display this information on an app basis. We have now rejected the request from our colleagues for the time being and hope for further development in the SugarCRM standard. In any case, I will submit this again as an enhancement request.

Hey everyone,

I think that this could be solved by creating a custom subpanel - I assume (but I admit I'm not 100% sure) that those can be displayed in the mobile app as well. All the customizations are done in the link class, and from the clients (i.e. mobile app) perspective, this is a subpanel like any other, so it shouldn't have any problem displaying it. In any case, this should be very simple to verify.

This article is fairly old, but I have a gut feeling that things haven't changed much in this area, so it should still work, and I have used that technique before. You can also look at subclasses of Link2 for inspiration.

You then have two options: either display the "grandchildren" meetings in a separate subpanel and have two subpanels, or (which is probably preferable) construct the query to include both meetings related directly to the Account and the "grandchildren" meetings.

However, just so you know, there is (and apparently always has been) a fairly tricky bug in SugarQuery that breaks its ability to do "n-deep" joins, which you will be needing here - see this comment for an example, which dates back to 2016. I encountered the bug when building QuickQuery and managed to find a way to work around it, but it's not easy to do.

For your purposes, I think you'll be better off if you either a) build a raw SQL join (although not sure if that's permitted in sugar-hosted instances), or b) use the less efficient method of creating a separate SugarQuery that loads all contacts related to the accounts, get their IDs, and then create a join on invitees where the contacts are IN the ids you fetched (I hope I'm being clear enough in the way I'm describing this).

Kind regards,

Gabriel

hi Martin Neitzke

Maybe I've totally misunderstood your requirement, what you need is already working OOTB, unless you are referring to meetings with Contacts from many different Accounts?