Project of the Month - March 2008

Enhanced Search

Description of project

Trove Info

Why are you a leading contributor in the SugarCRM community? What are the benefits that you experience from your involvement?

I have developed many CRM/ERP solutions and as soon as I found SugarCRM I appreciated the dynamism of the community.

About the benefits, I'm publishing a version of this project for a fee and hope to produce revenue. Moreover, having advanced SugarCRM customization skills come in handy for my job. Last but not least, is self promotion of course.

What other projects have you been involved with on SugarForge.org?

Nothing right now, but I have some ideas.

What inspired you to create this project?

Everything started with the strong need to search for date fields both a From-date and a To-date search fields, instead of just single date search that SugarCRM CE has.

It was just an idea, but I happened to meet Mr. Clint Oram personally and we talked about it; maybe that has gave me the boost I needed to put it into practice.

What business pain points were you solving specifically?

Some kinds of searches are impossible with the base version of SugarCRM which are now provided by Enhanced Search. Enhanced Search provides the aforementioned From and To date searches, searches with OR and NOT clauses, text searches of a list of elements and even using regular expression pattern matching. In Enhanced Search 2.0 I've also added the empty field search capability which is very useful and was requested by the community. I've also extended the Enhanced Options to almost all types of search fields. I think that SugarCRM's advanced search capabilities should tend towards the typical SQL query's.

Is there anything that the users should know about those? Something hidden/new in this project? Think of this as an opportunity to describe how it works to a user.

The usage is described in the README file, even though I may say that a quick start tutorial is not really needed. In fact, after installing the module, the user can find the new Enhanced Options in every search page (except the Basic Search), and the new Enhanced elements are self-explanatory. I've added a "TIPS 'N' TRICKS" section to the README file of version 2.0, to show some advanced usage exmples. Besides, Enhanced Search uses the SugarCRM's standard visual elements and is fully integrated with SugarCRM (for example the elements change along with the Sugar Themes). French, German and Italian languages are also supported to make text as easy to understand as possible. SQL skilled users are also have it easy since many Enhanced Options are strictly related to the SQL language.

What would you say to encourage additional community participation?

I think that everything you give to an Open Source community, in this case SugarCRM, is given back to you in some way or manner (hopefully Enhanced ^__^).

What do you want to build next for Sugar Suite?

I'm thinking about a new version of Enhanced Search, which lets the user manage and group the clauses at will. Every search field might be assigned to one or more sub-groups, that might appear in the query and optionally ANDed, ORed or NOTed. I'd like to get user feedback about this.