I need some advice. I am customizing SuiteCRM to work for an industry vertical. I have added custom fields to different modules here and there, and changed field labels. However, I have had to heavily customize the opportunities module. I have renamed the module, and added about a hundred fields to the module. Is this the right approach or should I redo everything in a custom module? I need all the relationships and where the opportunities module is in the business process cycle. Is there an easy way to copy a standard module into a custom one? What about all the relationships, references, links from other modules, etc?
I’m trying to stay away from much development work, but also want to do this right. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
this heavily depends on the purpose of the customized module. Do you use the opportunity in the same way as it is meant to work in SuiteCRM or does it have a totally different application? In the second case it would be more useful to create a custom module.
Another question: why on earth do you need 100 additional fields? This seems like a design concept failure.
Unfortunately you cannot copy your standard module in a custom module. You would have to build it from scratch.
The purpose of the renamed module is more like a “case” module in SuiteCRM; however, where is falls in the lifecycle of CRM space, is similar to an opportunity. As far as the number of fields are concerned, it could not be helped. There was quite a bit of information that we needed to keep track of and this was the only way. They are “in-addition” to the existing fields which were also required, and not “in lieu of”.
I read some articles about how to copy a standard module manually into a custom module, so I’m going to try that in a sandbox environment and see how it works out.
Create a custom module in module builder via the admin panel then deploy it. But dont create the relationships in module builder just the basic module and fields. You can then create relationships to anything else you need through studio or manually. Module builder only allows you to create very basic modules but they are the ideal starting point for your own customisations. It may be possible to copy and paste some of the var defs from opportunities into your custom module to copy over some of the functionality without cloning the entire module which is not advisable.