Andrew Minton andrewminton

Providers: An Introduction

Providers is a concept that was introduced with Symphony 2.3 which allows extensions to natively provide new Data Source types. This allowed for a more seamless experience for users and opened up a world of possibilities for extension developers. The upcoming Symphony 2.3.1 release brings Providers to Events as well, allowing developers to provide new event types selectable from the native Event editor.

For Users

For users, the benefits are more flexible and powerful DataSources and Events that can start to do things that previously required custom code. Extensions such as Cacheable DataSource, Union DataSource and Remote DataSource all bring powerful functionality to the fingertips of every Symphony ninja (and those in training). The addition of Events means that we can now create extensions that abstract common API's (such as Github) to read and write information without any knowledge of the underlying API.

For Developers

Written based on hacking away at a custom event which aimed to take its data solely from entry data and $_SESSION values, and not posted values (which I understand may have been open to DOM hacking and required "ugly" frontend hidden fields).

Things I think I've learned

Use Xpath in PHP when possible

I was traversing the XMLElement object generated by SymQL (or Entry object generated by EntryManager) with the object's methods and foreach to get values, which seems to require a lot of effort and code:

php

	<data>
	<datasource>
	<section handle="test-section">Test Section</section>
	<entry>
	<page-path handle="about">/about</page-path>
	<page-title handle="about">About</page-title>
	<title handle="about-this-company">About This Company</title>
	<template>
	<item id="2" handle="content" section-handle="page-templates" section-name="Page Templates">Content</item>
	</template>

	<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
	<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
	<xsl:output method="html" encoding="UTF-8" indent="yes" />
	<xsl:template match="/">

	<xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes"><</xsl:text>!DOCTYPE html<xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes">></xsl:text>

	<xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes"><![CDATA[
	<!--[if lt IE 7 ]> <html lang="en" class="no-js lt-ie9 lt-ie8 lt-ie7"> <![endif]-->
	<!--[if IE 7 ]> <html lang="en" class="no-js lt-ie9 lt-ie8"> <![endif]-->

	<?php
	define('CLIENT_ID', 'YOUR_CLIENT_ID');
	define('CLIENT_SECRET', 'YOUR_CLIENT_SECRET');
	define('REDIRECT_URL', 'YOUR_REDIRECT_URL'); // for testing, use the URL to this PHP file.

	define('AUTHORIZE_URL', 'https://www.formstack.com/api/v2/oauth2/authorize');
	define('TOKEN_URL', 'https://www.formstack.com/api/v2/oauth2/token');

	if (!empty($_GET['code'])) {

	/**
	* CSS only 'lightbox'
	*/

	body {
	font: normal 1.5em/1.5 sans-serif;
	background: #0cf;
	color: #444;
	min-height: 100%;
	padding: 2em 10em;

	{ "keys": ["alt+1"], "command": "open_browser", "args": {"keyPressed": "1"} },
	{ "keys": ["alt+2"], "command": "open_browser", "args": {"keyPressed": "2"} },
	{ "keys": ["alt+3"], "command": "open_browser", "args": {"keyPressed": "3"} },
	{ "keys": ["alt+4"], "command": "open_browser", "args": {"keyPressed": "4"} }

	<data>
	<preferences>
	<sitename>Client - Portfolio</sitename>
	<languages>
	<entry id="1" handle="english" lang="en">English</entry>
	<entry id="2" handle="francais" lang="fr">Francais</entry>
	</languages>
	<stylesheets><entry id="1"><url link="http://link-to-main.stylesheet.css"/></entry></stylesheets>
	<scripts><entry id="1"><url link="http://link-to-main.stylesheet.css"/></entry></scripts>
	<navlinks>

	<?php

	require_once(TOOLKIT . '/class.event.php');

	Class eventsave_order extends Event{

	const ROOTELEMENT = 'save-order';

	public $eParamFILTERS = array(
	'etm-new-order-notification'

	module.exports = {
	menu: {
	'wall': { title: 'Wall', name: 'wall' },
	'logs': { title: 'Logs', name: 'logs', submenu: {
	'system': { title: 'System', name: 'system' }
	} },
	'stats': { title: 'Stats', name: 'stats' },
	'admin': { title: 'Admin', name: 'admin', submenu: {
	'users': { title: 'Users', name: 'users' },
	'grants': { title: 'Grants', name: 'grants' }