espoCRM first steps in development

[mediaseer]

Hi everyone,

I’ve been trying to add a custom portal page to my EspoCRM installation (v9.0.6) but I keep hitting a wall — no matter what I do, the route returns a 404. 🧩 What I’ve Done:

• Manually placed JS files in client/custom/src/portal/views/my-custom-page.js and client/custom/src/portal/routes.js
• Verified frontend/libs.json exists
• Confirmed client/src/view.js is present
• Set useCache => false and isDeveloperMode => true in data/config.php
• Ran php rebuild.php and also cleared data/cache/ manually
• Checked for data/cache/client-custom.json — it’s never generated
• When testing Espo.require('customortal/views/my-custom-page') in the portal console, I get Module not found

🧪 Other Details:

• Portal ID is correct
• Custom route name is #MyCustomPage
• Page defined using the standard view class
• File permissions appear fine
• I’ve tried this both on Cloudways and Krystal.io — same result

It seems Espo’s rebuild process isn’t registering the JS files at all. Has anyone seen this before? Is there a rebuild debug mode or something else I can check?

Thanks in advance for any insights 🙏

— Clive

[yuri]

Hi,

Could you show your frontend route file?

You need a client route file and a controller class. Then, that controller would create a view. But you could just start with the route + controller. Then, move further as you got the controller action called when the needed URI is opened.

https://docs.espocrm.com/development/frontend/controller/#custom-route

[mediaseer]

Hi Yuri

Here’s my custom frontend route file:

define('custom:portal/routes', ['portal:routes'], function (Dep) {

Dep.prototype.routes['MyCustomPage'] = 'actionMyCustomPage';

Dep.prototype.actionMyCustomPage = function () {
this.main('custom:portal/views/my-custom-page'); 
};

return Dep;
});

I haven’t added a separate controller yet, just using main(...) to directly render the view.

But I can also try switching to a dedicated controller like this:

define('custom:portal/controllers/my-custom-page', ['controller'], function (Dep) {
    return Dep.extend({
        actionIndex: function () {
            this.createView('myCustomPage', 'custom:portal/views/my-custom-page', {}, function (view) {
                view.render();
            });
        }
    });
});
​

Then use the route:

Dep.prototype.routes['MyCustomPage'] = 'myCustomPage/index';
​

Would that be the more appropriate approach?

Thanks

Clive

[yuri]

We don't have such route classes. I recommend to try follow the documentation first.

You need to create define a route in JSON in metadata: https://docs.espocrm.com/development.../#custom-route

Then the controller. Your controller looks legit.

[mediaseer]

Hi Yurii,

Thanks for the pointer.

I've followed the example from the documentation:

https://docs.espocrm.com/development/frontend/controller/#custom-route

I successfully created a custom client-side route and confirmed that the controller works — I can extract and log values from the URL using options.id in the console.

However, when I moved on to testing the Rendering view example, I ran into an issue:
Running this:

php rebuild.php

cat data/cache/client-custom.json | grep views/account/test

Returns:

cat: data/cache/client-custom.json: No such file or directory

So client-custom.json isn’t being generated at all, and that prevents the frontend from resolving the view path, leading to errors like:


GET .../api/v1/Account/234 404 (Not Found)

The files exist at:

client/custom/src/controllers/my-controller.js

client/custom/src/views/account/test.js


And I’m using the code exactly as shown in the Rendering view section of the docs.

Interestingly, rebuild does regenerate other cache files — just not client-custom.json.

Any thoughts on what might prevent client-custom.json from being created? Could something in the JS files be preventing them from being picked up?

Thanks again!

Clive