Author Topic: Outlook Addon - Group and Tag Update (Read 3704 times)

polestar · February 23, 2010, 05:19:21 am

Hi Guys,

Kinda stuck here.

We are working on the Outlook Component to synchronize contacts, groups and tags from CiviCRM to Outlook.

We have been able to successfully get information about new and updated contacts from civicrm_log table but when contacts are added to group or tagged (or removed) no entry is made into log and hence we can (*easily) update the mailing lists on Outlook with the updated information (add/remove).

Any suggestions/pointers welcome.

Thanks
Rohit

Donald Lobo · February 23, 2010, 06:18:12 am

can you implement a hook on the groupContact table and use that hook to update outlook or record in the cache table which feeds outlook, which u then delete periodically?

i think releasing the code (hopefully under AFL / AGPL / GPL v3) with just contact synchronization would be a great first start

lobo

xavier · February 24, 2010, 09:05:23 am

You can probably populate directly the civicrm_log table using a hook on group/tags too.

Oh yes, Opensource tool to sync with outlook would be lovely.

X+

polestar · March 09, 2010, 01:45:56 am

Hey Guys!!

Just to give you an update on where we are at with Outlook Addon.

We have implemented the following features:

Download all the contacts from CiviCRM to Outlook
Update contacts for any changes to contacts
Schedule periodic download
Create Mailing lists for all groups and tags
Update mailing lists for changes (at the moment this is being done by deleting all existing mailing lists and recreating them)

The features we are working towards:

Sync only updates to groups and tags (Our customer has 800 records assigned to one group and it take a lot of time in re-creating them again)
Sync deletion of contacts
Authentication (it is a big security problem at the moment with CiviSync, that it is not asking for any credentials from the users and hence it opens a link to the data for a possible exploitation. This is our highest priority as soon as the features are completed. This also is the biggest reason of the delay in releasing the code as well. We have the solution to this and it will be implemented soon.)

Regarding Sync only updates to groups and tags and sync deletion of contacts there is nothing in CiviCRM database/log table which logs the following information:

Contact deletion from the database
Contact Update is logged but there is no flag in the log table to differentiate between an insert or update
Group update or insert
Tag update or insert

Is there a particular reason why this hasn’t been implemented? Hooks are good and we can implement them but they are not a complete solution and when we release in Open Source, every user will have to implement those hooks in their setup.

I wonder if there are any plans of implementing this in CiviCRM in near future? If that's the case then we can implement these so that the code can be included into the CiviCRM.

The other item which we will have to include with the setup process is NuSOAP.

Any thoughts... ideas.... suggestions??

Regards
Rohit

xavier · March 09, 2010, 03:10:24 am

Sounds great.

What about the licence ? Is this going to be open source or you want to offer this as a paid solution and have you thought of the price ?

X+

polestar · March 09, 2010, 04:26:18 am

GPL v3

xavier · March 09, 2010, 04:55:11 am

Great news.

To answer to your questions, having a more complete log has been discussed, including being able to log what content has been changed (before/after).

The suggested approach was to use triggers and let the db handle the logging itself. It wasn't implemented mostly because the budget to cover the dev cost wasn't available if I recall properly.

The structure of civicrm_log might need to be modified to be easier to be parsed. The field data is made to contains "something", but probably not easy to parse.

eg:

129 | civicrm_contact | 2969 | civicrm_contact,125:civicrm_note,67 | 4 | 2008-02-24 21:05:24

Anyway, on one of my site, got:

+---------------------+----------+
| entity_table | count(*) |
+---------------------+----------+
| civicrm_activity | 43555 |
| civicrm_contact | 8745 |
| civicrm_domain | 16 |
| civicrm_event | 28 |
| civicrm_participant | 121 |
+---------------------+----------+

ie, it's already used to log more than the contacts, shouldn't be too hard to extend to handle entity_tag and civicrm_group_contact. One issue I can imagine is that the id stored isn't always very useful (eg. the id of the participant). Better to have both the id of the contact and the id of the event in that case or a join is good enough ?

For your other need, I think it would need an extra action column enum (CREATE,MODIFY,DELETE).

and obviously having more apis or new methods to fetch the stuff you need.

X+

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Author Topic: Outlook Addon - Group and Tag Update (Read 3704 times)

polestar

Outlook Addon - Group and Tag Update

Donald Lobo

Re: Outlook Addon - Group and Tag Update

xavier

Re: Outlook Addon - Group and Tag Update

polestar

Re: Outlook Addon - Group and Tag Update

xavier

Re: Outlook Addon - Group and Tag Update

polestar

Re: Outlook Addon - Group and Tag Update

xavier

Re: Outlook Addon - Group and Tag Update