CIVICRM: Custom Field that uses financial type id

Question

I'm new to Civicrm PHP and extension development so I'm sorry if this is a dumb question. ^-^

I'm making an extension that creates a new custom field group, the custom field group is meant to replicate the fields of a contribution (so it has payment method, amount, currency type, ETC).

The problem is the financial type id field, unlike payment method there isn't an option group that I can link the custom field to.

I've made a work around by creating an option group, updating the values inside to copy any changes made to the financial type table, while it's somewhat functional it's messy, breaks my site sometimes and has caused me hours of work fixing it (I've had to make checks in install, uninstall, enable, disable, postCommit hooks)

Is there a way I can add it to cause less bugs/errors like the contribution form, or should I just stick with my current work around and optimize it?

Help would be appreciated! I've been working on this extension for nearly a month atp haha ^-^

Answer 1

Handling install, uninstall, enable, disable is exactly what hook_civicrm_managed() is for! While this is an admittedly strange use for it and I have to wonder whether reproducing contributions using custom fields is really the best way to approach whatever problem your extension is trying to solve... that aside, it can be done!

1. Upgrade your copy of civix to the latest version.
2. Find the id of the option group you've already created to represent financial types (let's say it's 99).
3. From within your extension's directory, run the command civix export OptionGroup 99
4. This will generate a new .mgd.php file in your extension's managed directory.
5. The file consists of 1 declaration of the optionGroup, plus a declaration for each option value. Leave the first one, and you'll convert the option values to a foreach loop:
6. In the .mdg.php file, you can call the api to fetch all financial types, then loop through them to add to the return value.