Sugar Serve Answers & Best Practices - Recent Threads

RE: How to have rich-text field for Description in Tickets and Notes

Andre Serrazina — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 09:48:58 GMT

Just to clarify: TinyMCE is already included in Sugar, so you simply need to update the vardef of the target field to use it.

For example, for the Cases description field, creating this file will be enough.

./custom/Extension/modules/Cases/Ext/Vardefs/tinymce_description.php

Content:

  <?php
$dictionary['Case']['fields']['description']['type'] = 'htmleditable_tinymce';
$dictionary['Case']['fields']['description']['dbType'] = 'longtext';
$dictionary['Case']['fields']['description']['len'] = '4294967295';

I imagine you may already know this, but wanted to leave it here for clarity.

Thanks,

André

How to have rich-text field for Description in Tickets and Notes

Samuel Mallare — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 18:18:12 GMT

In Tickets and Notes, the Description field is plain text.

What's a good way to convert it to rich text so we can simply copy-and-paste images/videos?

RE: How to have rich-text field for Description in Tickets and Notes

Samuel Mallare — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 06:38:32 GMT

Thank you, Andre. Much appreciated! I'll check this out.

I was able to google that before. I'm hoping there's a simpler way. I hope Sugar can come up with a native rich-text field without any external integration or add-on like TinyMCE. This is a basic need.

Anyway, thank you again.

RE: How to have rich-text field for Description in Tickets and Notes

Andre Serrazina — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 16:07:31 GMT

Hello Samuel Mallare ,

The simplest approach would be to convert your description fields to htmleditable_tinymce, as described in the following link:

support.sugarai.com/.../

With this, you can paste images directly. For videos, unfortunately you would need to use the file upload button.

Let me know if this helps.

Cheers,
André

RE: help creating BP to email contact on cases set to "Customer" for 14 days

Elisabeth Hunt — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 18:22:15 GMT

I said to my colleague "This guy Chris is 100% going to answer" and sure enough... thanks dude!

help creating BP to email contact on cases set to "Customer" for 14 days

Elisabeth Hunt — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 15:21:32 GMT

Hi all,

When we reply to a customer we set the case status to "Customer". I want to create a BP that

- checks if a case has been at customer for 14 days

- sends an email to the primary contact saying "hey, if we don't hear back in 7 days, we will close this case"

- closes the case if it is still at customer after those last 7 days

I'm struggling with the entire thing. If a case goes to customer, and I start the timer, then the person replies (which automatically changes the status to "Pending not new"), I'd need the counter to start over. And if the initial 14 days pass, and then the person replies, I don't want the case to be closed after the next 7 days.

Help?

RE: help creating BP to email contact on cases set to "Customer" for 14 days

Chris Raffle — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 20:22:33 GMT

Hi Elisabeth ,

The best way to handle these 'if-then-else' scenarios in SugarBPM is with event-based gateways. An event-based gateway allows you to define 2 or more scenarios at an inflection point of your process and which ever scenario happens first is the path the process will take. Based on your description, the process should look something like this:

With each event-based gateway, they are either waiting for the specific period of inactivity to expire or for any status change on the case (to cover for scenarios where an agent manually updates the case status, the customer replies, etc.). If the status changes while it is waiting for the wait timer expiration, then the process immediately ends. Then if the case later returns to a 'Customer' status, it kicks off a new process from the beginning.

You could design this process to be open from the time it first enters a 'Customer' status until its eventual closure, but I recommend keeping processes with wait timers and receive message events as succinct as possible. These types of processes can add overhead processing time on the backend when there are a large number of open processes to parse.

I hope this helps!

Chris

RE: Report on dashboard - limit to 1 line

Yves Bourgarel — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 09:10:32 GMT

Hello,

Thanks for your answer,
Unfortunately I'm not a partner but a client's administrator. So I don't touche code 😞

Report on dashboard - limit to 1 line

Yves Bourgarel — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 11:13:11 GMT

Hello,

If I use a report in a dashboard and one of the item as a long value, the item will create a large line because the value is fully displayed.

For exemple :

Unfortunately I can't use a viewlist, which limits to 1 line.

Do you know if there is a way to set that up so it displays on 1 line only ?

Thanks

RE: Report on dashboard - limit to 1 line

Angel Magana — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 17:59:39 GMT

Hi Yves,

I believe I've found a solution for you, but it requires a minor code customization. In essence, the formatting for that view needs to be altered a slight bit in order to cause it to only use one line and that would be done through CSS.

The one issue, though, is that this change will also alter the behavior of Rows and Columns reports, as the dashlet in your screenshot is effectively using the same view. In other words, that dashlet and the Reports module are intertwined with each other and you can't easily alter one without altering the other.

To apply the change, you'll need to create a file named custom.less and add the following to it:

.dataTablePlaceholder td.wrap-report-text {
}

.dataTablePlaceholder td.wrap-report-text .ellipsis_inline {
}

.dataTable td.wrap-report-text {
}

.dataTable td.wrap-report-text .ellipsis_inline {
}

Save the custom.less file to ./custom/themes and then execute a Quick Repair and Rebuild and that should do the trick.

RE: "+" button to duplicate a field

Yves Bourgarel — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 15:01:22 GMT

Damn, that is what i was affraid of. But not surprised.
Thanks for the answer.

"+" button to duplicate a field

Yves Bourgarel — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 15:07:07 GMT

Good afternoon,

I was wonedering if it was possible to have, let say a "Phone2" and some kind of "+" option to add a second field "Phone2" ?

I tried to find that without success, so not sure if it is possible within the studio.

thank your help

RE: "+" button to duplicate a field

Andre Serrazina — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 15:23:53 GMT

Hello Yves Bourgarel ,

The functionality you are describing is similar to what we have for email addresses. Email addresses are stored in a separate table, which allows multiple email addresses to be related to a single record (for example, an Account).

Phone numbers, on the other hand, are stored directly in the target table (or in the <module>_cstm table if the field is custom).
Because of this, it is not possible to dynamically add multiple phone fields in the same way.

As a workaround, you could create an additional custom field (for example, phone_2_c) and then use a dependency so that this field is only displayed when certain criteria are met (for example, when a checkbox is selected).

However, this would be limited to a predefined number of phone fields and would not allow adding phone fields dynamically on the fly.

Would this approach work for your use case?

Best regards,

André

RE: Help with custom query to extract email text?

Elisabeth Hunt — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 16:58:25 GMT

WOW, André, thank you!! Let me give this a shot!

Help with custom query to extract email text?

Elisabeth Hunt — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 14:38:14 GMT

Hi all,

My support team interacts with customers via email through Sugar Serve. I'd like to have a custom query where I could say "show me all emails between this specific support person and any customer in the last month" that would include the text of the emails (I am trying to extract this to feed to a LLM). Can anyone help?

RE: Help with custom query to extract email text?

Andre Serrazina — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 16:51:11 GMT

Hello Elisabeth Hunt ,

While testing this locally I was using older demo data and overlooked an important detail.

In newer versions of Sugar, the fields that store the email body (description and description_html) are compressed and encoded to reduce database storage.

As a result, when you export the CSV from the query, those two columns will not appear in readable form.

They need to be decoded before the data can be used normally.

To make this easy, I prepared a small Python script you can run on the .csv file after downloading it.

It reads your export and adds two new columns containing the decoded text for description and description_html.

Here is the script:

import base64
import zlib
import csv
import sys
import os

def decode_field(value):
    """Decode Base64 + raw DEFLATE fields. Return original value if decoding fails."""
    if not isinstance(value, str) or value.strip() == "":
        return value
    try:
        raw = base64.b64decode(value)
        # -15 = raw DEFLATE (no headers)
        text = zlib.decompress(raw, -15).decode("utf-8", errors="replace")
        return text
    except Exception:
        return value

def main():
    # --- Handle missing argument ---
    if len(sys.argv) < 2:
        print("Usage: python3 decode_custom_queries.py <input_file.csv>")
        sys.exit(1)

    input_file = sys.argv[1]

    # --- Check if the file exists ---
    if not os.path.isfile(input_file):
        print(f"Error: File not found: {input_file}")
        sys.exit(1)

    # --- Create output filename ---
    base, ext = os.path.splitext(input_file)
    output_file = f"{base}_decoded{ext}"

    # --- Process CSV ---
    with open(input_file, newline="", encoding="utf-8") as f_in:
        reader = csv.DictReader(f_in)
        fieldnames = reader.fieldnames + ["Description_decoded", "description_html_decoded"]
        rows = []

        for row in reader:
            row["Description_decoded"] = decode_field(row.get("Description"))
            row["description_html_decoded"] = decode_field(row.get("description_html"))
            rows.append(row)

    # --- Write decoded file ---
    with open(output_file, "w", newline="", encoding="utf-8") as f_out:
        writer = csv.DictWriter(f_out, fieldnames=fieldnames)
        writer.writeheader()
        writer.writerows(rows)

    print(f"Done! Decoded file saved as: {output_file}")

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

To use the script, simply create a .py file with the content provided above.

Once the file is saved, you can run it from the command line with:

% python3 decoder.py exportedFileFromSugar.csv

After it runs, you’ll see a message like:

Done! Decoded file saved as:exportedFileFromSugar_decoded.csv

This new file will contain the same data as the original export, but with the email text fields fully decoded and human-readable.

Please let me know if you’re able to use it successfully or if you’d like any help.

Cheers,

André

RE: Help with custom query to extract email text?

Andre Serrazina — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 15:05:05 GMT

Hello Elisabeth,

This is an interesting request, thanks for sharing it.

Before building the query, the first step is confirming where the communication content is actually stored.
In Sugar, emails can originate from multiple places (inbound email, email-to-case, direct replies, etc.), so we want to be sure the messages you want to extract are indeed stored in the emails module and not, for example, in Case Notes.

Assuming everything is stored in the Emails module, the tables you want to look in the database are:

emails – main email metadata (ID, subject, dates, direction, etc.)
emails_text – this stores the actual email body and header fields

With this in mind, you can build a query to retrieve all emails where your support representative’s email address appears as the sender, and then filter them by date (e.g., the last 30 days). Once you have that dataset, you can further remove internal communications by filtering the to_addrs field to include only customer domains.

This could be an example query to get you started:

SELECT 
    e.id,
    e.name AS subject,
    e.date_sent,
    et.from_addr,
    et.to_addrs,
    et.description,
    et.description_html
FROM emails e
INNER JOIN emails_text et 
    ON e.id = et.email_id
WHERE 
    et.from_addr LIKE '%support_person@yourcompany.com%'
    AND e.date_sent >= DATE_SUB(NOW(), INTERVAL 1 MONTH)
    AND e.deleted = 0
ORDER BY e.date_sent DESC;

Let me know if this helps.

Cheers,

André

RE: Can a process definition be used to link a case to a customer, it doesn't need to be dynamic, just a fixed customer every time

Chris Raffle — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 11:50:58 GMT

Hi Sam ,

I don't believe it is possible to modify a parent relationship on a record with SugarBPM's native features. Here are the following options to consider:

You can implement a custom logic hook to handle this scenario. Custom logic hooks require Sugar development expertise. We can provide you a quote on this effort if you don't have a developer on-hand. The drawback to this solution is that it requires a developer to maintain any changes or fixes over time.
We sell a plugin, Upsert BPM Essentials, that adds often-requested features to SugarBPM so that administrators have direct control over processes that would otherwise require custom logic hooks to achieve. We do not currently cover your requested use case in the plugin; we are willing to add the feature if you purchase a subscription. If you would like to discuss this option in more detail and go through a demo of the plugin, please reach out via our website.

Chris

Can a process definition be used to link a case to a customer, it doesn't need to be dynamic, just a fixed customer every time

Sam Cody — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 09:53:23 GMT

We have a PD that only triggers when certain cases are created, we want to automatically relate the case to a fixed customer account, is this possible?

Action buton to open a built url

Yves Bourgarel — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 09:46:29 GMT

Good morning,

I have fields on the contact module that open an url built from values from the contact.
For example : www.myurl+{SugarContactnumber}.com

In order to make it cleaner, i would like the link to appear as a button.
However when creating a button with an action "open url", i can make a calculated field, but not build one as I did before.

Do you guys know if it is possible from a button ?

thanks

RE: Action buton to open a built url

Yves Bourgarel — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 08:43:24 GMT

it was that simple yes.
Thanks !

RE: Action buton to open a built url

Brenda Rossetto — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 20:13:53 GMT

Hi Yves, if I am understanding correctly, you should be able to do this with an Action Button like this:

Does that solve your question, or is there more to it?

-Brenda

AI agent provide initial response to incoming cases?

Elisabeth Hunt — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 19:14:53 GMT

I'm interested in having an AI agent provide an initial answer to incoming cases. Anyone doing this? Sugar Intelligence seems to work great with accounts and opportunities, but it only seems to summarize cases. I'd love to have an agent that could respond to cases for my team, hopefully providing a useful answer before any of my humans even see the case.

Business rule return error message

Yves Bourgarel — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 07:47:36 GMT

Good morning,

I created a business rule that looks like this :

Long story short, i want value to change depending on the subject title when a case is created.

Then, in a BPM, i added this business rule under the step "Assignation en fonction du titre".
Finaly, if the a case went through one the conditions, it has to go to the "End Event #1", otherwise, it will follow another step.

However, i keep getting an error message.

What did i do wrong ?
I suspect something about the last line in the business rule ?

Thanks for your help

RE: Business rule return error message

Yves Bourgarel — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 06:58:47 GMT

It worked !
Thanks, i knew my last line was shady