A SugarCRM user was recently struggling with reporting based on custom fields in her CRM. Our expert, Justin, jumped in and provided the advice she needed. Here are the details of the issue and its resolution:

Issue

The user’s company had a custom dropdown called “Call Result” on the Calls module to track results when they’d attempt to call a customer. Examples of these values include “Scheduled Call” and “LM” for “Left Message”.  She needed to create a report of the last call result for each Contact. To gain that report, it’s necessary to update every call’s parent Contact with the call’s result. So, she started using Advanced Workflow, but ran into a wall: 

• You cannot copy the value from a dropdown into another field using an Update Field Action in Advanced Workflows

When the user was unable to copy the call result from the child Call to the parent Contact in her workflow, she was stuck.

Solution

Justin advised her to use a gateway to read the value from the Call Dropdown. Using a Gateway allows us to know the value of the Call Result field.  Based on the value of the Call Result field, we can move to an Update Field Action that is hard coded to the correct Call Result value. The Advanced Workflow would look something like this: