Sugar Developer Guide Version 5.1

Creating a Custom SugarField

Let's try to create a new type of field for rendering a YouTube video. In this example, we will use a custom text field in the Contacts module and then override the DetailView of the custom field in the metadata file to link to our YouTube video. Here are the steps:

1)	Create a custom text field in the Contacts module from the Studio editor

2)	Add this custom text field to both the EditView and DetailView layout

3)	Save and deploy both of the layout file changes

4)	Create a directory include/SugarFields/Fields/YouTube. The name of the directory (YouTube) corresponds to the name of the field type you are creating.

5)	In include/SugarFields/Fields/YouTube directory, create the file DetailView.tpl. For the DetailView we will use the "embed" tag to display the video. In order to do this we need to add in the template file:

{if !empty({{sugarvar key='value' string=true}})}

<object width="425" height="350">

<param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/{{sugarvar key='value'}}></param>

<param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param>

<embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/{{sugarvar key='value'}}" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"

wmode="transparent" width="425" height="350">

</embed>

</object>

{/if}

You will notice that we use the "{{" and “}}” double brackets around our variables. This implies that that section should be evaluated when we are creating the cache file. Remember that Smarty is used to generate the cached templates so we need the double brackets to distinguish between the stage for generating the template file and the stage for processing the runtime view.

Also note that will use the default EditView implementation that is provided by the base sugar field. This will give us a text field where people can input the YouTube video id so you do not need to create EditView.tpl. Also, we do not need to provide a PHP file to handle the SugarField processing since the defaults will suffice.

6)	Now go to custom/modules/Contacts/metadata/detailview.php and add a type override to your YouTube field and save. In our example, the custom field was named "youtube".

 

array (

'name' => 'youtube_c',

'type' => 'YouTube',

'label' => 'LBL_YOUTUBE',

),

 

Your custom field is now ready to be displayed. You can now find an id value of a YouTube video to insert into the EditView and render the video content in the DetailView! Remember to set your system to Developer Mode or delete the EditView.tpl or DetailView.tpl files in the cache/modules/Contacts directory.