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July 27, 2012 - Comments Off on Drupal commerce, rules, and beyond

Drupal commerce, rules, and beyond

When creating and processing orders with Commerce in Drupal, you will sometimes need to modify or manipulate the data at some stage in the checkout processes. As we've seen in earlier posts you can easily create or modify rules in Drupal to do just about anything. [hook_coffee_init() anyone?]. If you need to manipulate the current order, create a new rule and set it to React on the Completing checkout process event. Now  you will have access to the $commerce_order object and all of its data goodness.

Now that the Commerce Order is in scope we can access it and perform and action on it. We won't worry about setting any conditions for the rule for this example. Create a new Action for the rule and set it to Execute custom PHP code. You will now see that the $commerce_order object is available. You can start manipulating it with code right there in the PHP code block, or pass the $commerce_order object to a custom module. This is the way we chose to do it. Since we needed to do some extra stuff with the data such as compare some of its values with an external database application it seemed to make more sense to create a module with that code and have it accept the $commerce_order object. We were then able to do better and quicker coding and version control with code kept in external files out side of the rule.

To call your function, just enter it in the PHP code block and include the opening and closing PHP tags as per the instructions:

<?php mechmod($commerce_order); ?>

Here is a quick module sample that can accept the $commerce_order object and do something with it. Create these two files in /sites/all/modules/mechmod

mechmod.info

name = Mechanism Commerce Infandibulator
description = Do stuff with a $commerce_order object
core = 7.x
version 0.0.1beta

mechmod.module

<?php
/**
 * function to do stuff with $commerce_order object
 */
function mechmod_commerce_object_raw($commerce_order) {
  if(module_exists('devel')) { // If devel module is enabled, use dpm()
    dpm($commerce_order);
  }
  else {  // otherwise, just print it out
    print('<pre>'.print_r($commerce_order,TRUE).'</pre>');
  }
}
?>

Now enable the module:

% drush en mechmod --yes

(--yes will automatically choose 'yes' for you instead of being prompted by drush to confirm)

Now, whenever you complete the checkout process the whole $commerce_object will be printed out. This isn't terribly pretty, but it is the beginning of being able to see and then access the data in the order and from there to manipulate it.

Happy coding,

Published by: chazcheadle in The Programming Mechanism
Tags: , , ,

July 20, 2012 - Comments Off on Drupal: Connecting to multiple databases in your module

Drupal: Connecting to multiple databases in your module

Have you ever needed your Drupal site to access data from a different database? from a different Drupal installation? The Drupal database abstraction layer has the ability to switch between databases! We are working on a project that requires a Drupal website to talk to another database on the same server. Updates to the website must also be made to the other database, in this case a membership directory.

By setting up multiple databases in the settings.php file for your site, you can load up your data from the website, then switch to the second database to make updates. If you are doing data migration from one Drupal site to another, this can be very handy.

First, in settings.php expand the default database declaration array:

[cce_php]
$databases['default']['default'] = array(
      'database' => 'drupalsite',
      'username' => 'drupalsite_user',
      'password' => 'drupalsite_pass',
      'host' => 'localhost',
      'port' => '3306',
      'driver' => 'mysql',
      'prefix' => '',
    );
$databases['external']['default'] = array(
      'database' => 'groucho_db',
      'username' => 'groucho',
      'password' => 'groucho',
      'host' => 'localhost',
      'port' => '3306',
      'driver' => 'mysql',
      'prefix' => '',
    );

Then in your new module you can load your data:

/**
 * Implements hook_user_save().
 */
function awesome_user_save(&$user) {
  $user_obj = user_load($user->uid);
  // Load the Users favorite Beatle (George, of course)
  if(isset($user->field_favorite_beatle['und']) {
    $favorite_beatle = $user_obj->field_favorite_beatle['und'][0]['value];
  } else {
    $favorite_beatle = 'George Harrison';
  }

  if(db_set_active('groucho')) {
    $result  = db_update('Users')
        ->fields(array('Fav_Beatle'=>$favorite_beatle))
        ->condition('user_id', $user->uid, '=')
        ->execute();
    // Check on success of query
    if(!$result) {
      // Error executing query
    }
    elseif($result->rowCount() > 0) {
      // Query succeeded- rowCount() will report number of rows affected
    }
    else {
      // Query ran, but no rows were affected
    }
    db_set_active();
  }
}
[/cce_php]

With some error checking in there, and ensuring that db_set_active() is called at the end, you have loaded data from your Drupal site and entered into an external database! This can be run in the other direction too. You can retrieve data from another database and populate Drupal objects like nodes and users directly. The things to watch out for with this method are that the database engines must be the same, i.e., mysql, postgres, etc., and to be sure you find more information of which database is active when you are accessing data.

Published by: chazcheadle in The Programming Mechanism
Tags: , , ,