Adding Audit Logs to Reports

My users had a need to query the audit log for various modules in ways that the current built in system would not allow.  Now I could create advanced report after advanced report but really I hate making advanced reports. So I added myself a JIRA task to create some way of reporting on the Audit Logs.

All the files are available for download from the GitHUB link at the end of this post.

This was my list of criteria for this project

1. I need a way to report on any modules audit log
2. I need a way that allows a manager to create their own reports
3. That method has to be familiar to them already (this was really me saying I wanted it in the Reports module)
4. It must not allow editing of Audit Logs in any way
5. It must be fast over millions of records (some of our audit logs are huge)
6. It must translate all the raw data back into English
7. It must allow our system admins to include that new audit_events table data in the reports
8. It cant break the current Audit code

Developer Centric Logging

A few weeks ago I wrote some posts about overriding the CRON handler and I showed code about Developer Communication.   Since then I have talked to a few people and they all wanted to know what that cryptic function call did so I thought I would look into releasing it.   When I looked at the code I realized that I could not release it as it was crap.  So I took a week and rewrote it into this.  What we have here is a custom logger.  I found scant few examples of custom loggers on the internet so I hope someone finds this useful.

I think it adds all the missing pieces into SugarCRM's SugarLogger function like timers, headers, line tracing, email, and notifications.

Customizing cron.php

Customize cron.php without replacing the stock file

I wanted to add functionality where I would be emailed if any of the cron jobs failed for any reason.  I found in $sugar_config there is an option to override the cron class that is used to run scheduled jobs and normal cron related things. You can add it to the config_override.php file like this...

Adding custom, global, upgrade-safe PHP functions to SugarCRM

This falls into the category of hard to find.  It is clearly outlined in the SugarCRM Developers Guide but I have never seen anyone use it.  There were no postings on the message boards about it and I simply stumbled upon it one day.  I wanted to consolidate some code written by others, there were functions that were repeated over and over again in module after module.  So I wanted to find a way to easily move these functions into someplace that was shareable by all modules and was upgrade safe.

Add a JQuery plugin style to a SugarCRM field - Checkboxes to Switchery

This is the first in a series where I will show ways to add JQuery custom UI elements to SugarCRM views.   This is fairly easy to do for most JQuery plugins.



In this post we are going to use Switchery.  This JQuery plugin will convert normal checkboxes to iOS style buttons as shown above.   It has a few options but in this first part we are just going to stick to the defaults.  First we have to get the plugin loading into SugarCRM.  We could use the JS loader plugin they released a while back but I had issues with that loading the script multiple times so we are going to stick to the tried and true JSGroupings for this one.