Chapter 5. Integrating Your Application with the Outside World

Up to this point, all of the customizations done have been inside the SugarCRM application itself. With this we have built a nice workflow inside the application, and streamlined many activities that before would require many data entry points to make the app easier to use and to cut down on data entry errors. But with an application like this, there are more users than just the ones who will log in into the SugarCRM instance. These users are the ones from the outside world who are submitting data we will be importing into the application.

Since the very early days, SugarCRM has had a web services API that used SOAP for interacting with your Sugar instance, and it’s one we’ve used extensively in the third-party integrations that exist in the commercial editions of the product (such as the Office and Lotus Notes plug-ins; iOS, Android, and Blackberry mobile clients; and the self-service portal). In Sugar 5.5, we greatly enhanced the API by simplifying the API calls, added versioning to help avoid API breakages between versions, and implemented REST support in addition to our already existing SOAP support.

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