Adding expired/grace membership numbers to the Membership Dashboard

Question

I am looking at add a column for expired/grace members to the Membership Dashboard, but I am running into a roadblock on how to do it.

I know that the DashBoard.tpl file pulls in list of new and renewed members and that DashBoard.php also needs to modified. Dashboard.php refers to CRM_Member_BAO_Membership, which comes from CRM/Member/BAO/Membership.php. There are three functions in Membership.php, getMembershipJoins, getMembershipRenewals and getMembershipStarts that pull numbers from the SQL side.

My problems: 1. In Membership.php there is this function: public static function _getActTypes() { which very helpfully has this as a code comment: * @todo document me - I seem a bit out of date....

These functions call things from the CRM_Utils_Array, which I cannot find. Which file is that in? I am not a PHP programmer, but is this a general function call that is extended by several files?

2. Does CRM_Utils_Array::key('Membership Grace', $activityTypes); or CRM_Utils_Array::key('Membership Expired', $activityTypes); exist? If it doesn't, would I add such a function to Membership.php and then call it through the previously mentioned files?

Answer 1

In my experience, the Membership Dashboard isn't really a great tool, and I was it was deprecated. It's extremely inflexible (as you're seeing here) and any reports you need can be placed on the main dashboard as a dashlet. So I would recommend a different approach.

To answer some of your other questions - class names and file locations map to each other. You should find the CRM_Utils_Array class in <civiroot>/CRM/Utils/Array.php.

Finally, it's a bad idea to change core CiviCRM files, because they'll be overwritten on upgrade.