CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I am building an extension that uses external libraries that are not in the CiviCRM distribution. The 'standard' way of approaching this would be to:
- create a 'packages' directory in my extension directory, and put the libraries there,
- have a require_once('library/entrypoint.php'); statement in the extension code.

However the include_path statements in _myextension_civix_civicrm_config does not provision for such extensions directory, forcing me to have workarounds in the extension code. I would therefore propose to make the following changes in the civix templates:

in template for function _myextension_civix_civicrm_config, replace:
  $include_path = $extRoot . PATH_SEPARATOR . get_include_path( );
  set_include_path( $include_path );

with:
  $include_path = $extRoot . PATH_SEPARATOR . get_include_path( );
  if (is_dir($extRoot . 'packages')) {
    $include_path = $extRoot . 'packages' . PATH_SEPARATOR . $include_path;
  }
  set_include_path( $include_path );

If you dont have too many packages, you can always install it in the root of your extension, and then use:

require_once 'thelib/main.file.to.include.php';

lobo

Hi,

Not sure I understand why you call it workaround. What's the issue of putting the path of the library relative to the root of the extension instead of to the package extension?

The only reason I can think of not doing the same in the core is that PEAR tend to want to be in the include path, so the package had to be added. So having the package folder in the include path is the workaround, not the other way around

Points well taken, let's forgo the proposed civix change. Thanks for your input.