SugarCRM SOAP API

I don’t know when SugarCRM, the open source CRM tool, first acquired a SOAP API but I missed it completely. I’ve used SugarCRM a few times, on quite a casual level, and only fell across the SOAP API because I needed it.

The first thing to note is that the SOAP API for SugarCRM is advertised as being incompatible with the PHP 5 SOAP client implementation, and they recommend you use nusoap. However this isn’t true and I found it worked fine with PHP 5 in non-WSDL mode.

The second thing to note is that the documentation is rubbish. The best I could find is on their developer wiki and it isn’t enough to write an application with. I had to do a fair amount of fiddling around on the server side to understand when I was making mistakes which isn’t ideal for remote system calls! They do, however, have very good inline documentation so I ran PHPDocumentor over the file which had the stuff I was dealing with in it. I can’t find an equivalent online so you can see my copy over here

Also if you go to your own sugar installation and append /soap.php to the URL, you will see some information there about formats plus a link to the WSDL. The WSDL isn’t very human-readable but the top bit of it defines the custom data formats like “name_value_list” and shows you how to assemble them to submit to SOAP. If I can work out a good way of presenting that information I’ll add it somewhere and link to it.

There will also be a follow-up with the script that worked for me. If this helps, or you have any questions, then add a comment please :)

9 thoughts on “SugarCRM SOAP API

    • Hey Lorna,
      I am .Net developer, and I would like to know are these SOAP APIs exposed by SugarCRM, are compatible with data types which we use in .Net?
      I am in the intension of integrating a .Net application with SugarCRM. Till now I could add the the proxy generated on the basis of WSDL to my .net app and could invoke the web methods exposed.
      But then I am struck, and I need your help badly.
      Hoping for your reply.

  1. Since SugarCRM only works with PHP5 in non-WSDL mode, I had to create all my calls from scratch. The SugarCRM documentation is somewhat minimal, as I may have mentioned, and I found I was mostly reading the WSDL to figure out how to format my SOAP calls.

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