Open up hidden tables for editing in CRM.

By | October 1, 2010

Last weekend I got a chance to visit a holiday resort by the lake side. It was just heavenly with the silence and peace, to be woken up in the morning by the chirping birds rather than the blackberry alarm, trekking, swimming. Ahhh! Just awesome. The hectic life in the city does make you appreciate the weekends and most importantly the beauty of nature. It was just one of those lazy afternoons where I was relaxing and I happen to see few ducks in the lake. They were gliding smoothly and gracefully in the water. They seem to do it so easily and effortless. Isn’t it? But below they are actually furiously paddling away flap, flap, flap :-)..

And guess what; even the serene atmosphere could not help me take my mind off SageCRM. I thought that the duck represented the primary and secondary entities of SageCRM which are visible to the users. They can create screens, views, lists etc. Design them in the way they want and present them accordingly; however the “paddling” is done by the other tables which are not seen from the SageCRM interface but are very important for the primary and secondary entities and for the working of SageCRM.

Now from a SageCRM perspective there could be requests from the customer that they would like to see these tables and add fields to it and work on it like a normal SageCRM secondary entity. Is this possible? Just imagine a duck moving in the water with its legs on top…a bizarre 🙂 thought to say the least. But SageCRM is no duck and it can be done. Here is how.

The secondary entity drop down list displays only those tables that have null value in Bord_Hidden field in the Custom _Tables in SageCRM database. So to display table in secondary list you need to update the value in Bord_Hidden field with a NULL value for that particular table entry and IISReset. That’s it. You will now be able to see the table in the seondary entity list. Needless to say, please backup the database before making such changes.

I still cannot get my mind of the thought of a duck gliding in the water with its legs in air. Guess its time for another break!!!!

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