Extend libraries from third_party folder

Not as automatically as it works in CI.

You can still extend another class in your library, but you can’t alter the library that EE uses at its core. So you need to instantiate your own class. You can still use the loader to do that though:

So to extend form validation you could do:

$this->EE->load->library('form_validation');
$this->EE->load->library('robs_form_validation');

And in Robs_form_validation.php in your third_party/libraries folder you would do:

class Robs_form_validation extends EE_Form_validation { ... }

Does that help?

Well, what I was looking for was to alter an existing core/extended class, so that other parts of EE which aren’t under my control would be affected. I can’t have that effect if I just load my own library. I’ll have to come up with another workaround, thanks Pascal.

From a programming perspective there are ways of doing that, but we recommend against it.

Essentially, if more than one person extends a class we run into conflicts that we can’t resolve. Another add-on or EEs core code may expect a class to work a certain way. It becomes very difficult to troubleshoot. I elaborated on it here here.

Could I ask what you’re trying to do?

OK taking that into consideration, my new plan is to override the class temporarily, do my stuff, and restore the original class, so that no one else is affected.

$this->channel_standalone = new Channel_standalone;

$this->channel_standalone->entry_form();

$temp_output = $this->EE->functions->clone_object($this->EE->output);

$this->EE->load->library(
    '../third_party/robs_addon/libraries/RA_Output',
    array(),
    'output'
);

foreach (get_object_vars($temp_output) as $key => $value)
{
    $this->EE->output->{$key} = $value;
}

$this->channel_standalone->entry_form();

$this->EE->output = $this->EE->functions->clone_object($temp_output);

I’ll admit this is hacky, but as I see it right now this is the only way I can achieve what I want. With this kind of method EE becomes 100x more extendable.

But really, the root of my problem here is that the channel entries api uses show_error. I don’t think an API should have that responsibility of erroring out my application.