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ACT! Technology Corner
Custom Tables in the ACT! SDK

ACT! has enjoyed a long history as a product allowing powerful customizations to suit business needs. Debuting in ACT! 2008 (10.0.2), the ACT! SDK exposes Custom Tables functionality, allowing new custom, related entities to be associated with Contacts, Groups, and/or Companies.

In a typical scenario, the ACT! SDK can be used to create custom entities and custom fields, and a custom tab in the detail view of Contacts, Groups, or Companies. The tab normally provides a list with custom entity data, alongside a User Interface (UI) to enter custom data. Custom Tables can be used to provide new horizontal or vertical business-specific functionality in ACT!, but also to provide rich integration with existing systems by synchronizing and storing the data in ACT!, as well as displaying the information and/or functionality in ACT!.

The ACT! SDK allows full control of the creation and management of both Custom Table entities and fields, including dropdown fields and behavior, allowing powerful business-tailored entities to be developed and used in ACT!. Custom Table entities can be secured much like other ACT! data, including record-level security (public/private), and field-level security. Expected fields like Record Manager, Record Creator and Editor, alongside related date fields (Create and Edit date) are always created as part of Custom Table entity. Custom Tables data synchronizes naturally along other ACT! data, such that remote databases can also leverage Custom Tables functionality.

Custom Tables reporting can be done via the ACT! OLE DB provider, which fully supports Custom Tables data. Also, Keyword Search can be used via the SDK to find data housed in Custom Tables.

A sample implementation of Custom Tables, policies (shown below), can be downloaded from the ACT! Developer Network.

Sample implementation downloads are available here.

Xavier Musy
Architecture, ACT!
Sage Software

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