Hook look

Still stuck on this one and running out of things to procrastinate the problem with. Anyone have any thoughts on how I might be able to hook into the “after create custom field” event?

Solved it. If anyone else has a need for it, this is how I got past it.

First, you need to find out where ExpressionEngine creates the new column. This is done in libraries/api/Api_channel_fields.php in the method add_datatype(). If it is merely modifying the column you would use the method edit_datatype(). So once that was found, I created an entry in my config/hooks.php file as such:

$hook['post_controller'] = array(
    'class'     =>  'Api_channel_fields',
    'function'  =>  'add_datatype',
    'filename'  =>  'after_add_custom_field.php',
    'filepath'  =>  'third_party/hooks/',
    'params'    =>  array('field_id'    => $field_id)
);

That will hook onto the end of that function, meaning that the column has already been created. From there it’s fairly academic. Just run a describe on the exp_channel_data table and on your shadow table, in my case exp_workflow_channel_data and then do an array_diff() on the results and add the missing column to the shadow table to sync them back up!

This is almost exactly what i needed to see.. not only that, but the same day? Random.

The thing that gets me is that we specify which codeigniter Class/Method we want to hook into. For you field copy thing you could just attache to the pre-controller hook, and check your column counts every time. It’s a little bit of extra overhead but with as many queryies as EE makes when loading a page anyway, I’m fairly certain it’s not a noticeable slowdown.