Using hooks -- simple please

Question

I am excited to be working with civicrm, but I am quite frustrated at this point and so I hope someone can help me.

I can see how valuable hooks are, and it seems like they are actually very basic to implement, but I need a small amount of pre-knowledge to use them. I have read every link I could find about hooks to change forms and yet I find myself lost.

I did find one example that fit my needs exactly, and would be a great learning experience ... but the description leaves out a lot of necessary information for someone as new as me.

Can someone walk me though implementing this? It comes from How can I set “Assigned To” for an Activity to default

The extension mentioned in the comment above is:

function myextension_civicrm_buildForm($formName, &$form) { if ($formName == 'CRM_Activity_Form_Activity' && $form->action == CRM_Core_Action::ADD) { $form->setDefaults(array('assignee_contact_id' => $form->_currentUserId)); } }

• How do I find the 'create activity' form this relates to?

I got that answer myself -- CRM _ Activity _ Form _ Activity means the php file is in

/var/www/drupal/sites/all/modules/civicrm/CRM/Activity/Form and then activity.php

• Do I copy the form to my /var/www/drupal/sites/all/modules/civicrm_extensions directory?
• Do I put that function inside the form I copied?
• Do I create that as a file?
• If a file, what do I name it?
• Where do I put the extension once I create it?

You are all very helpful and I appreciate it. Thank you in advance for any help you can give me on this problem I face.

Just a note about searching for answers: About a month or two ago I found a web page that explained some of this to me but for the life of me I fail to find that page today. I did find a lot of links that looked like they could help but a whole mess of them led to (Page Not Found) on http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/. Seems a lot of pages were deleted or renamed.

Thanks again.

Answer 1

To use a hook, you can:

• Write a CiviCRM extension. This is the preferred method.
• Write a Drupal module.
• Write a Joomla or Wordpress plugin.

The easiest way to write a CiviCRM extension is to install civix and run civix generate:module org.myorg.myextension. Then you can edit myextension.php and paste in that code.

However, as that page says - this presumes that you have a basic knowledge of PHP, Unix, and object-oriented programming. If that's not a skill you're going to learn today, and you want to cheat a little - take an existing extension and hack it! Download an existing function, preferably one that does very little, and modify it to your needs. I just uploaded an extension to Github that fits this need exactly here.

Answer 2

There is also a pretty basic example here: https://github.com/CiviCooP/no.maf.oppgavexml This extension creates 2 files, introduces a page and a form. Might be able to give you some more understanding. But the real recommendation would be to take part in a CiviCRM developer training or CiviCRM sprint? Depending on where you are in the world you might be interested in a developer training in London that is coming up?