Custom hook tokens not working in CiviMail

[Michael McAndrew]

Hey guys,

Not all tokens are created equal

I was experiencing this problem on 4.2.6 in CiviMail with tokens that started with {contact.

If I changed them to start {alumni. then they worked. 

The tokens in the wiki start with another word like party or date http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC42/Hook+Reference#HookReference-hook_civicrm_tokens which i suspect is why lobo and others weren't experiencing the problem.

Not sure at the moment whether this is a useful function or a bug but since contact.* tokens worked in sms, pdf and send email I suspect the later.

Working this out was a fun + and a massive hair pulling out experience

[Micah Lee]

It looks like this is still a bug in some cases. I'm having this same problem using Drupal 7 and CiviCRM 4.2.6. When I send a test mailing to an email address or a group my hook_civicrm_tokenValues gets called and fills in the values correctly, but when I send the mailing and the process_mailing cron job does the sending my hook_civicrm_tokenValues never even gets executed.

Also, my tokens don't start with "{contact.", so Michael's solution won't work for me.

However, I'm run another CiviCRM site where this works completely fine. I'm not sure what's different. Is it possible that the cron job that's sending the mailing isn't bootstrapping Drupal in the correct way, so that my custom module that implements these hooks isn't getting loaded, but it is loaded when I send a test mailing?

[Micah Lee]

Fixed it. It turns out that it wasn't working because the custom module that implemented the hooks wasn't getting loaded during each cron job call.

This bug was preventing it from getting loaded: http://issues.civicrm.org/jira/browse/CRM-11212
And applying this patch fixes the problem: http://issues.civicrm.org/jira/secure/attachment/18386/CRM_Utils_Hook_Drupal.patch

Thanks Lobo for helping on IRC!

[idmacdonald]

On a CiviCRM 4.2.2 install that I administer, I still get this problem sometimes. However, it seems to be caused by a more general problem with custom fields that seems to be fixed by clearing CiviCRM's cache tables. Custom fields don't export correctly and custom field tokens don't work. However, a 'drush civicrm-clear-cache' does seem to solve the problem. I've put that drush command into crontab so that it runs once a day. So far that seems to have fixed it.

-Ian

[Andrew Perry]

For others trying the above command without success, you might be looking for 'drush civicrm-cache-clear'