RedHen and Views

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kristofferwiklund's picture

I have installed RedHen CRM on a dev site for evaluating if it is the path for a CRM system to a customer.

But I was missing a lot of views. In the description it talks about being similar to Drupal Commerce. But Commerce is built around Rules and Views. And I am missing that about Redhen CRM.

So I was hoping that Redhen had views for different part of the system. Like /redhen/org or /redhen/org/%id/connections. So one could just use the contextual links and edit the view. But if I want to redesign the layout I need to create new views myself (and for moste part I want is it is not a final CRM system).

So my question is. Are there any plans for make Redhen use more Views? I know that it makes views dependent but building a CRM system in Drupal without views is very slow and hard.

If there is some plan for it I will dig into the module and start using it and try to give feedback to the project. But otherwise I probably go with other solution because Redhen is not given me so much extra.

Comments

RedHen provides Views and Rules support

seanberto's picture

RedHen CRM provides Views and Rules support. It does not ship with preconfigured Views, because that would immediately require that you override the module's Views with your own. And if you've worked a lot with Features, you've probably encountered how challenging that can be.

Instead, we provide more generalized EntityFieldQuery-based views (lower-case "v") that can be overridden with your own Views simply by creating them with the same URL paths.

In our experience, as well as that of the majority of outside developers and site builders with whom we work, this is a more flexible approach that leads to faster Features-based development.

Moreover, given that RedHen CRM is designed for you to manage your own contact/organization bundles and field them however you need, it'd really be next to impossible for us to even know what Views to ship.

What you will likely see happen is that more and more RedHen CRM distributions and features will be released by ThinkShout and the community (see OpenOutreach's RedHen Feature) with preconfigured contact/organization bundles and Views that provide a more prescriptive starting point for folks who don't want to take on fully customizing their own CRM instance. But again, we think that the core of RedHen CRM benefits from deeper abstraction.

Cheers,
Sean

Where are the views?

chopper_elation's picture

You said, "Instead, we provide more generalized EntityFieldQuery-based views (lower-case "v") that can be overridden with your own Views simply by creating them with the same URL paths."

Where do these general views live? How can I see them? Where's the list of views? Not under Structure --> Views.

Thanks!

Chopper_elation, EFQ-based

seanberto's picture

Chopper_elation,

EFQ-based listings (views) are managed in code. In this case, we're returning EFQ results on the pages that are defined as menu callbacks in the module code. For example /redhen/org and /redhen/contact. EFQs are also being used to display tabular data in the various tabs on the individual contact and organization pages.

This approach is used in a lot of places in Drupal. For example, /admin/content (the default administrative view of nodes on a Drupal website) is built with EFQ. There are contributed Views modules that provide alternative versions of this admin screen that are built with the Views module.

So, really, to see a list of EFQ-based pages that ship with RedHen CRM, just take a look at the menu items that the module defines. Most leverage EFQ in some capacity.

Good luck!
Sean

RedHen CRM

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