Custom Hook Prior to DB Write for Cases

[Richard Bramley]

I am trying to standardize the format of custom fields attached to a Case on save - that is, make them all upper case.  Initially I thought that the custom hook was the place for this to happen, but apparently it is only called after the values have been written to the DB.

Is there another hook that I could use?  Or does anyone have another suggestion as to how this could be achieved?

Thanks

[totten]

a) Have you tried to simply do a SQL UPDATE in the current hook (ie after the record has been written)? That won't work for all use-cases, but it sometimes works. (The limitations: [1] doing novel SQL updates within hooks sometimes produces deadlocks; if you need it, there's a work-around that's helped me before.  [2] the SQL UPDATE generally wouldn't update PHP's in-memory data. Both limitations are subjective -- their relevance depends on the particular use-case, and the only way to be confident is to test.)

b) You might define a SQL trigger:

http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/hook_civicrm_trigger_info
https://github.com/civicrm/civicrm-core/blob/4.4/CRM/Utils/Hook.php#L1089

e.g.

Code: [Select]

  'table' => 'civicrm_value_my_table_123',
  'when' => 'BEFORE',
  'event' => array('INSERT', 'UPDATE'),
  'sql' => array(
    'NEW.my_field_456 = upper(NEW.my_field_456)'
  )

This tends to be more robust with multiple apps/use-cases/flows, but some folks report that administering triggers can be tricky on sophisticated mysql deployments (e.g. replicated mysql).