CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I have a client, a school, who is moving to CiviCRM from another CRM.  In their previous CRM they had an Inventory Management feature that they need built into CiviCRM.  Basically the Inventory Management feature tracks physical 'Materials' going in and out of the school.  An example of a 'Material' in their Inventory Management system is an International Student Guide which is handed out to international students who are interested in the organization.  These international students are contacts in the CRM and one form of contacting the student is to send them material from inventory, in this example the International Student Guide.  When contact's are sent material through the CRM, the inventory for International Student Guides is automatically deducted.  The Inventory Management feature also allows for inventory to be added for Material's in the system.

First question would be, is there something like this out there?  Next question would be what is the best way to build this?  Do I put the schema for this data in the Civi database or Drupal database?  I'll need to add forms to the CiviCRM administration that will Add/Edit/Delete Material's, is there a good example of a Drupal module out there that adds CRUD functionality for some features which would show the BAO/DAO classes and Smarty templates necessary to pull that off?

Any help is much appreciated!  Ideally I'd like to pull this off entirely within a Drupal module, staying away from core Civi so that I can possibly throw it back into the community.

MERCI would definitely be good to look at in regards to track use of items/resources -- but it really is a checkout/reservation system first with some inventory components. I don't think it would handle the use case of having X student guides, and tracking the distribution of each of those guides that I assume would never be coming back. A more MERCI-compatible workflow would assume that people were renting the guides and then returning them. Hopefully that makes sense.

One thing I'd really like to see in order to help me understand plugging into CiviCRM from an architectural point of view, is an existing example of a Drupal module that adds pages and forms to the CiviCRM administration interface for whatever reason.  Any good examples out there?

That is awesome, just what I was looking for.  Thanks for pointing me to the great example.

The way the templates and Civi related PHP classes are included in sfsschool.module is exactly what I had thought I needed to do, but I hadn't quite got there.  This should definitely find it's way into the developer documentation, as it allows a developer to distribute template and Civi PHP classes without requiring the user set or change their values at Administer > Configure > Global Settings > Directories.  If you agree, tell me where would be a good place to put it and I'll write it up.  Perhaps updating the following pages?

http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC40/Five+simple+steps+to+creating+a+settings+page+for+your+module+or+custom+forms
http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC32/Customize+Built-in%2C+Profile%2C+Contribution+and+Event+Registration+Screens

The wiki pages u identified seem like a good place to do so

Go ahead and do it, might also want to link to the blogs since it serves as unoffical docs for the code

lobo