CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

We want to add a custom tab to the Contact screen, but without utilising the standard Custom Data UI (because we want to customise the widget which allows us to edit the data).

I have produced a module which adds a new tab to the Contact screen. The tab content is correctly generated, but Dojo rejects the inclusion of the content, instead displaying the message. I'm using Drupal 5 and CiviCRM 1.8.10400.

Error loading 'http://x.x.x/drupal/civicrm/contact/view/additional?reset=1&snippet=1&cid=1' (200 OK)
Accessing the same URL directly (copying it from the Dojo error) displays the page as per normal. There's nothing in the HTTP headers I can see which would tell Dojo that the content is invalid, and the result validates OK (once you add a DOCTYPE etc, as with other fragment requests).

This error message made perfect sense when I was getting 403 or 404 errors, but I don't get why it appears also with 200. I'm not familiar with Dojo.

I've attached a sample module which demonstrates how I've got it working thus far. civicrm_contact_extra.info and civicrm_contact_extra.module go in your Drupal modules directory (optionally in a civicrm_contact_extra directory) and ContactAddition.tpl goes in templates/CRM/Contact/Page/View/ or CIVICRM_CUSTOM/CRM/Contact/Page/View/

Getting Dojo to behave is the first step for me.

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Secondarily, I feel that my approach to returning the resulting template and then using exit() is not ideal. If I try to use the template mechanism to return the content, Drupal/CiviCRM adds a 403 Forbidden error. I suspect that this is because CiviCRM doesn't recognise the location that has been requested, and so a permissions request from Drupal to authorise the request is rejected. If I was using a proper API call (or using the API call properly!) to tell CiviCRM about this new request location, I expect it should work. But I don't know CiviCRM's internals well enough to be certain of how I should do this.

http://heydon.com.au/node/942 may have some clues, but appears to be for an earlier version of CiviCRM. Gordon Heydon's ecivicrm.module (the only example I can see which adds an extra Contact tab like this) also uses print('');exit(); ... so I did the same.

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Third and finally, I'd very much like to get this demonstration module working and post it as sample code for others hoping to take their CiviCRM Contact screen customisations to the next level.

It's my first attempt, so any critical feedback or pointers would be much appreciated - even just where I haven't followed standard Drupal/CiviCRM practice.

Chris:

(FYI: Back in Nelson now, so better timezone wise for u!)

With regard to 2, the "exit" is required since we dont want an entire page to be generated, we just want the small portion with the relevant content returned. CiviCRM does the same thing internally by using a GET variable, "snippet=1"

CiviCRM uses drupal's menu system for top level permissioning and uses one function (civicrm_invoke), so we can handle it internally. In your case I think using the drupal menu system is fine (till we figure out a clean way to allow people to extend our invocation scheme (by potentially having all url's processed by a class file of the same path?)

Lets chat more on IRC / IM

lobo