When you work with Module Builder and Studio, usually things go well. The only thing to remember is that once you start using Studio to amend things, you can’t go back to Module Builder. If you do you loose the Studio amendments, and that is really how it should work.

My problem today came from exporting customization from a development instance of Sugar and loading it into the production instance. I’ve done this many times, as a means of migrating custom fields, layouts and code (logic hooks). This time it didn’t work, and I’m not sure why. Certainly the manifest file of the exported module looked a mess, so it it is not surprising that it caused all sort or problems.

I’m not going to bore you with going through all the steps I had to take, but I would like to document the few general rules that I found applied. These need more testing out, so don’t depend on them 100%. If I have any wrong, or missed anything, please let me know.

1.    If custom fields don’t appear in the fields_meta_data table in the database, nothing else will solve your problems.

2. When you edit any vardef type fields, always do a Quick Repair afterwards. There is no need to clear cache or log off or anything else.

3. Sometimes you need to go into Studio, and save an deploy each of DetailView, EditView etc, to correct some type of problems.

I’ll add some more notes here from time to time, but I would be interested if you have any further suggestions or ideas.