CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Lobo's just implemented a new hook to add "search tasks" to the popup on the contact search page.  While I was looking into how to do this (before Lobo had done this)  I noticed that a CiviCRM component _should_ be able to do this.

I got it to work, but I had to fix some problems with how components work right now in the 2.2 tree.  The key piece is getting the getActivityType() method of the component interface implemented.

I'm attaching a sample implementation.  It's missing the implementation of the form itself, but since Lobo made this redundant, no serious deficiency.  But since components are good for other things, it's a start.

BTW: it would be good if components could be made "self registering".  The required change to the DB is small, and this only needs to be checked when someone is activating or deactivating components.  Why not have a small file (similar to the .info files in Drupal) that can be searched for by CiviCRM when the "Enable Components" page is rendered?  This would allow for deployment of components by people that don't feel comfortable running a raw bit of SQL.

Hey,

Rob - thanks for your implementation. I will take a look at it shortly and try to introduce into the codebase. One change I'm thinking of is introducing new method in component integration layer (since getActivityTypes has been originally planned for something else. The idea behind it was to allow component to plug in into core Activities and provide their own activity types with their own specific ways of handling them. Since there was no real need for this, it has been left unimplemented. For upcoming versions, we have a reason to come back to this concept, since CiviCase is making heavy use of activities, so we might end up coming back to the concept of dynamically registering activity types.

Also, when it comes to dynamic component registration - components concept has been made ready for this at the beginning, but since there was no real need for this back when componentisation was introduced, I didn't implement it. I've added the issue to the issue tracker (CRM-4128) and will discuss with Lobo on scheduling it (it's on 2.3 for now).
 
Matt - yes, we are planning to move forward with componentisation/modularisation of CiviCRM, and actually the next planned step is to make components separately installable.

Thx,
m