Help with Entities and filters

Coming from vTiger I am pretty confused with the way I need to use entities to get my custom fields into the system. Please advise how to do this best.

We use the CRM for setting up trainings in weekends. People pay through Magento so the details are there.
We have 24 weekends with each 2 groups. So weekend 1 has LU and SU groep as wel call it.

In vTiger I made custom groups and fields with checkboxes for every weekend in the contact itself. Below it a Notes field and a ‘paid’ field were we manual add the received payment (could be annually or per weekend)

1. I understand I need to make a separate entity with new fields but how do I connect this to an account/contact?

2. Is it wise to use a general ‘weekend’ field with for example a drop down ‘LU / SU / None” and re-use that in the contact or is it better to make a field for every weekend 1-24?

3. We need to do a ‘mailmerge’ and send every customer an email with his/her overview of the weekends. I assume I can make an email template with the variables from the contact but this comes back to question 2 what the best option is in the end.

4. In vtiger I can make a simple filter like ‘show customers who paid this and are in weekend 3 LU’ and re-use and even duplicate this. I see only manual filters and no way to make custom, re-usable filters. Any hints about this?

5. Would like to set the ‘paid field’ automatic later on but I assume that is a workflow option? Or should I add/connect some magento fields in the new entity? We use a multistore setup so clients are in several stores but not with the same SKU/products.

Looking forward to your comments and advice.

Bastiaan

Topic

[zebrahostingParticipant]

I found all the filter options so for now #4 has been resolved. Also saw I better use the Magento customer to ‘extend’ but still did not find the right ways to do it properly

[Artem LiubeznyiSpectator]

Hi Bastiaan,

Do you have the weekend details in Magento? If so, then the best solution indeed is to extend Magento Customer entity so these custom fields are synced. Here is how you do it. Same goes for the Paid field, if you have it in Magento.

As for your other requests, can you please give me additional details about the flow you want to implement? Namely, can a contact or customer attend multiple weekend trainings? And if yes, do you want to see all attended trainings on the contact view page?

I think we should be able to solve all of your use cases except probably for email templates, as we don’t yet allow to “unfold” many-to-one relations in our templates via variables. I.e. you can include details of the default contact of an account, but cannot list all the account’s contacts.

Regards,
Artem

[Author]

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