CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I recently saw this bit of Smarty code (from https://github.com/civicrm/civihr/pull/204/files ):

{if call_user_func(array('CRM_Core_Permission','check'), 'administer CiviCRM') }
 <a href="{crmURL p='civicrm/admin/optionValue' q='reset=1&gid='}{$result.id}" target="_blank"><span class="batch-edit"></span></a>
{/if}

It seems pretty minimal/effective. Not-with-standing the fact that it uses call_user_func() and references a specific PHP function, does this flow seem OK? For example, it could be made a little more maintainable with a new Smarty helper:

{crmPermission check="administer CiviCRM"}
  <a href="{crmURL p='civicrm/admin/optionValue' q='reset=1&gid='}{$result.id}" target="_blank"><span class="batch-edit">
{/crmPermission}

But that doesn't change the basic structure of the logic. There's a general attitude that templates should have minimal logic, but I'm not sure what the better alternative would be in this case (short of a big project to build a client-side permission API).

In its defense, call_user_func can be used in a boolean operators (!, &&, etc) and can work with {else}/{elseif} statements. Grepping on master, there are 43 spots using the call_user_func technique. All but 10 of them could be easily rewritten with a new {crmPermission} sketched before.

I think this would be almost as pretty as {crmPermission} and as flexible as call_user_func:

// Example Smarty notation
{if $crmPermission->check('administer CiviCRM')}

...

// Helper class
class CRM_Core_Smarty_PermissionAdapter {
  // non-static adapter for CRM_Core_Permission::check
  function check($perm) {
    return CRM_Core_Permission::check($perm);
  }
}

...

// CRM_Core_Smarty initialization
$smarty->assign('crmPermission', new CRM_Core_Smarty_PermissionAdapter());


Nice. now let's get the news out.

Should we have a changelog like for the api or rename the api one to cover more ground?

To get more devs, we need to be clear about what are the public stuff (functions/variables) you can build on vs. the ones that might change without notice.

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