How To: Retrieve a User ID via SOAP in SugarCRM

Following the Lead Generation Forms with WordPress and SugarCRM post, I came across the need to assign the generated lead to some person in the CRM. It would be easy if you could do it by simply using usernames in the system, but unfortunately usernames may change, but user IDs do not.

User IDs in SugarCRM are stored in a 36-byte alphanumeric string with symbols, which is easy to capture from the database, but not very usable that way. I worked a little more on the snippet I gave before and came up with a new function called getUserId, where a search is performed based on the username.

I’m not sure if this is very secure, but will surely work if you need to simply capture the ID of a certain user and perhaps hard-code it in your script or settings file. Make sure you read the previous post about SugarCRM to capture the whole Sugar class together with the authentication and lead creation functions. The following function is simply an addition to the class:

function getUserId($username)
{
	$result = $this->soap->call('get_entry_list', array(
		'session' => $this->session,
		'module_name' => 'Users',
		'query' => "user_name = 'pavel'",
		'max_results' => 1
	));

	return $result;
}

Once you’re done with that, use your sugar object to authenticate and request for a user id:

$sugar = new SugarCRM('username', 'password');
$sugar->login();

$result = $sugar->getUserId('john');
print_r($result);

So $result will contain an array where you’ll find the alphanumeric ID of the person with the username “john”.

I believe there was some other method for doing that in SugarCRM version prior to 5.5.2 CE, but the new SOAP Web Services are mostly based on a few general methods – get_entry, get_entry_list, set_entry, etc, which are applicable to basically any module including Users.

Now, in order to assign the new lead to your retrieved user (using the createLead function), just add an extra parameter to the array:

$result = $sugar->createLead(array(
	'lead_source' => 'Web Site',
	'lead_source_description' => 'Contact form on my website',
	'lead_status' => 'New',
	'first_name' => $_POST['firstname'],
	'last_name' => $_POST['lastname'],
	'phone_work' => $_POST['phonenumber'],
	'description' => $_POST['description'],
	'email1' => $_POST['email'],
	'assigned_user_id' => $user_id // Your ID goes here
));

Now your newly created leads will be assigned to your user, which is quite convenient when you have e-mail notifications turned on during assignment. Hope that helped somebody! Cheers, and thanks for sharing!