CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I'm writing a hook_civicrm_buildForm, and in the case of the CRM_Contribute_Form_Contribution form, I'm having problems because the hook seems to run multiple times per page view - once for the main page to load and once for a couple of AJAX calls that seem to happen after load.

I have written the hook to throw CRM_Core_Error::fatal sometimes, which it's doing in the AJAX calls because the the error throws when some URL args are missing.  It seems that throwing a fatal error causes the AJAX call to return the ENTIRE Drupal page with the error message instead of returning some smaller snippet to the ajax target element (see screenshot).

So 2 questions
1) How do I, and is it a good idea to, prevent the hook from running on the AJAX calls, or is there any other solution, and
     1.5) I probably don't want to actually prevent the hook from running, because then the ajax calls will be dealing with a different version of the form, so what do I do instead if my hook does things to $_SESSION that I don't want it to do twice, and
2) Is the returning of the entire page a CiviCRM bug?

I can't access any URL query string args from hook_civicrm_post , so I'm forced to pass them by saving them to session variables in hook_civicrm_buildForm .  Is there a better way to do this?

Haha.  I mean that, from hook_civicrm_post, CRM_Utils_Request::retrieve returns null, as does directly accessing $_GET.

Ought I use $_SERVER instead, or are you saying that $_SERVER is the superglobal that contains $_GET?

Maybe the post hook works from the form's "action" url, which is "/civitest/civicrm/contact/view/contribution" and has no query string, whereas the buildForm hook can see the query string.  In other words, the buildForm runs in a subse

Sorry, xavier, by "I meant that you use $_SERVER", are you telling me to store things there instead of session, or that I am already using it because $_GET is a part of it?

If I used $_SERVER, that would still be a way to pass variables from one hook to another through a globally accessible array, so I still ideally need to make a hash that I can assign to a particular instance of editing/saving the form so signals don't get crossed when someone has multiple windows open and is trying to edit multiple registrations at once.  Is that correct?

Maybe the post hook works from the form's "action" url, which is "/civitest/civicrm/contact/view/contribution" and has no query string, whereas the buildForm hook can see the query string.  In other words, the buildForm runs in a subse

Sorry, xavier, by "I meant that you use $_SERVER", are you telling me to store things there instead of session, or that I am already using it because $_GET is a part of it?

If I used $_SERVER, that would still be a way to pass variables from one hook to another through a globally accessible array, so I still ideally need to make a hash that I can assign to a particular instance of editing/saving the form so signals don't get crossed when someone has multiple windows open and is trying to edit multiple registrations at once.  Is that correct?

Why would you need to pass variables between hooks? if you need to check, from any hook, if you are called by ajax, just test $_SERVER['HTTP_X_REQUESTED_WITH'] != "XMLHttpRequest"

and that's it. I don't understand your need to pass variables between hooks.

X+

Hi,

In 4.2 I did some work on errors so that the fatal function *should* throw an exception (which would be caught by the API) if the api had been initialised. At the moment the BAO throws fatal errors where I believe it should throw exceptions & leave the calling layer (form or api or whatever) to handle it.

It would be interesting to see if the changes I made have changed the behaviour you are reporting.

jakecivi - there are some hook handling fixes (maybe only for d6) in 4.1.3 so I would suggest you try that upgrade in case it helps

Alright, that makes sense then.  I need to do the business end of things in the post hook.  Perhaps then it would work to use the postProcess hook to declare and assign a global variable (global $pid = $_GET['pid'], which then the post hook will have access to.  Does that sound right?