CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Coleman sent an e-mail to the API team with probably the most relevant questions possible to where we are going with the next release of the api so I thought I'd post it up here for elaboration..

So if there is a document somewhere about the master plan at work for v3, could someone please point me to it? If not, can someone please tell me:

    * When are we aiming to release v3?
    * Are there documented coding standards we're working from?
    * Is there a plan for a more standard way of validating $params? I would really like to see a single function in the utils.php that takes care of all validation.
    * Ditto for permission checking.
    * What's the best way for me to document bugs I find? For example, the most recent one I've banged my head against is that custom fields don't get processed when the user is logged-out, probably due to over-zealous permission checking.

Really we should update the answers here

http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php?action=post;board=41.0

But briefly

- hopefully we can get v3 in 3.4
-Tag.php should be the 'model' api - although it's not a contact based api so we need to build up one of them too (e.g contribution)
- There are 2 functions for validating $params:
    civicrm_verify_mandatory
    civicrm_verify_one_mandatory

verify one is for an either or e.g the $params would be array('id','name') meaning id OR name. It's just a wrapper  / reformatter for verify_mandatory

-     civicrm_api_check_permission(__FUNCTION__, $params, true); checks permissions but is not widely used - could do with some more detail

- document bugs by putting @todo in the code - it winds up in the todo list here http://api.civicrm.org/v3/

Also,

new standards are to use try & catch per http://api.civicrm.org/v3/__filesource/fsource_CiviCRM_APIv3_API_Contact_v3Contact.php.html#a61
And to use
civicrm_create_success
civicrm_create_error
to return results

  _civicrm_initialize( true ); in each function (as I think Coleman suggested)

Please feel free to interpret these onto the wiki (which is rather due a restructure)

So, the API SHOULD use civicrm_create_success but the behaviour will change