I had the need to take an existing module that had been built earlier with Module Builder, but needed some fields added. In fact there were a large number to add, so much in fact that I didn’t fancy entering them one by one in Module Builder.

As all were very similar fields I thought I should be able to edit files within the module directly. As it turned out this was quite possible.

The steps I went through were as follows.

1. Obtain the existing module. This is a zip file you can locate in the upload/modules directory

2. Unzip this file

3. Edit the vardefs file for the module you want to add fields to. If the module was Test, the file would be SugarModules/modules/Test/vardefs.php

When you look at this file you will see the format of the various fields. Just add and edit as needed.

Note you may wish to edit the language files as well, though I didn’t.

4. Zip up the folder again. Something like the following

zip -r ../test.zip *

Will give you a file test.zip that you can upload.

If the module exists, you will need to uninstall the previous version first. You can conserve the data.

5. Use Module Loader to install the modules.

That’s it. Most times you won’t want to do it this way, but in my case I needed to duplicate 5 fields 15 times. An horrible job in Module Builder.