Dispage ModuleSurfer - March 2012 - SugarCRM AotM

Dispage ModuleSurfer is the March 2012 SugarCRM App of the Month. Surf easily SugarCRM Modules with ModuleSurfer, a new plugin turning each Module into an AJAX grid. View all the records at one time thanks to the autoload on scrolling. Sort/ inline-edit/ delete the records: no page reload. ...more at www.dispage.com. Visit the SugarForge project.

Name, title and brief bio?

Patrizio Gelosi is the creator and developer of several popular SugarCRM projects starting from 2007 (with the version 5 of SugarCRM). Founder of dispage on 2010, he is the designer and maintainer of many projects for web frameworks.

Why are you a leading contributor in the SugarCRM community? What are the benefits that you experience from your involvement?

I believe that my professional choice to bet on the SugarCRM project is rewarding, not only in terms of personal skill growth and positive feedbacks, which are still an important part of the motivations: I think also that SugarCRM is a continuous source and marketplace of ideas and innovation that in many cases may also be extended and enriched beyond the original scope.

What other projects have you been involved with on SugarForge.org?

I have worked at many SugarForge projects, the most popular of which are Enhanced Search and Enhanced Studio.

What inspired you to create this project?

One of my guidelines in web development is to bring the usability typical of the spreadsheets in the web applications that manages data in a table view. I simply applied this concept to the SugarCRM List View so as to improve some existing features, for example the navigation of the record set, and to add several new ones, such as the inline editing that allows the user to edit with a click a field of a record in the List View.

What business pain points were you solving specifically?

The top two business pain points solved by ModuleSurfer are the time response of the List View navigation in modules with a large number of records and the usability of the interface for modifying values. Several ModuleSurfer users and customers have modules with over 1,000 (sometime over 100,000) records and they need a navigation tool more efficient than the record pagination of the SugarCRM List View. One of the ModuleSurfer key-feature is the separation between the loading of the page layout and the loading of the module's data. Thanks to this feature, user may load only once the module's List View page, then it may scroll the data in a data grid and load from the server only the data to be visualized, so as to minimize the traffic in the network and the time response of the system. Another ModuleSurfer key-feature, that many users with a team of data entry operators find very useful, is the above mentioned inline editing that allows a user with the proper permissions to edit a field value simply by clicking it in the grid.

Is there anything that the users should know about those? Something hidden/new in this project? Think of this as an opportunity to describe how it works to a user?

The basic idea of ModuleSurfer is to provide as many SugarCRM functionalities as possible via AJAX so as to improve the SugarCRM usability, and also to add new functions. Once loaded the List View page of a SugarCRM module, actions such as scrolling all the records, filtering, ordering, grouping them by a field, changing, deleting and adding a record may be easily and quickly performed without reloading the List View page. One of the functionalities added in the last release is the management of favorite records from the grid, so much requested by the users.

What would you say to encourage additional community participation?

I think that joining the SugarCRM community is an extraordinary opportunity for a professional development and, what's more, it can have an immediate implication in terms of business opportunities, as evidenced by my personal experience.

What do you want to build next for Sugar?

We are basically preparing new enhancements for the existing projects, thanks also to the invaluable contribution of the community members with their suggestions and feedbacks.