Object Creator Extention

Overview

This extension allows you to dynamically create new objects on the fly that have custom default values filled in at the time of object creation.

Use

It is simple to use:
  1. Extract files to extension directory
  2. Enable the extension in the extensions section of the administration web page
  3. Under Roles and Permissions, add a permission for anyone who should be able to create objects through this model for all access to the ObjectCreator module. (regular object creation permissions will still take effect, even though you are granting all access to this module)
  4. Where you would normally place a form to create an object, change the post action to be this module: 
       {* Are we allowed to create new object under this node? *}
   {section show=fetch( content, access,
                        hash( access, 'create',
                              contentobject, $node,
                              contentclass_id, 'comment' ) )}
      <form method="post" action={"ObjectCreator/createobject"|ezurl}>
      <input type="hidden" name="ClassIdentifier" value="comment" />
      <input type="hidden" name="NodeID" value="{$node.node_id}" />
      <input class="button new_comment" type="submit" name="NewButton" value="{'New Comment'|i18n( 'design/base' )}" />
      </form>
   {section-else}
      <h3>{"You are not allowed to create comments."|i18n("design/base")}</h3>
   {/section}
  5. You can now add hidden (or not) input fields to set the default attribute value on the newly created object. The user will be taken to the edit page and have the option to change the value there, of course. 
          <input type="hidden" name="default_attributename" value="some value" />
    Where attributename is the name of the attribute (not the number). Note that it does't take quite the same format as the usual edit pages. For example, to set a date attribute, you'd just use something like: 
          <input type="hidden" name="default_date" value="2005-04-24" />
    Instead of the usual 3 fields for month, day and year.

Object Creator PHP Class

I've taken code from a number of places, both from ez.no and from other example extensions, and made a class for object creation. It is useful standalone for importing from other systems. You can include it directly and create objects with a one line function call. See "ObjectCreator/modules/ObjectCreator/ezobjectcreator.php".

Limitations

As of yet, this module does not handle every attribute data type. To know what it does and doesn't do, look at the select statement inside of ezobjectcreator.php mentioned in the last section.

Incorporation into ezp mainline?

I would love to see this incorporated into the main ezp development. This is what would need to happen:
  1. All I did was cut-n-paste the code from content/action into my module, trim it down significantly and add a small loop to handle all the "default_attributename" post fields. This part would be easy to incorporate.
  2. The more difficult part is that the conversion from string value to attribute data type is not currently handled cleanly. Ideally appropriate functionality would be added to each of the data type php classes. I started out attempting to use their fetchObjectAttributeHTTPInput() style function calls, but those require the object attribute id's in the POST variables, and those id's don't exist until after the object is created.

License

Copyright (C) 2005 Nathan Sharp. All rights reserved.

This file may be distributed and/or modified under the terms of the "GNU General Public License" version 2 as published by the Free Software Foundation and appearing in the file LICENSE included in the packaging of this file.

This file is provided AS IS with NO WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, INCLUDING THE WARRANTY OF DESIGN, MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

The "GNU General Public License" (GPL) is available at http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html.