Hooks

Introduction

The usual way of overriding method behaviour in an object oriented context, is to override them in derived classes.

Magic methods in ATK are methods that are similar. The difference is that these are not overrides, because these methods are not present in the base class. The reason is that these methods are dynamic in nature. ATK checks whether these methods exist, and if so, calls them.

This concept might be confusing, but is best explained with an example. Add this method to your node:

 function name_display($record)
 {
   return "Hello World";
 }

'name' refers to an attribute of your node. If this magic method exists, ATK will call name_display every time it want to display a value from the 'name' attribute, instead of its usual display logic. If you try this code, you'll see that the 'name' column of a recordlist will now only contain 'hello world' entries.

This example also demonstrates why these are 'magic methods'. There is no name_display method in atkNode, because atkNode has no knowledge of what attributes your node may have at any time.

Whenever we refer to magic methods in the ATK documentation, we usually refer to <attribname>_display, where attribname should be replaced by an actual attribute from your node.

When to use it

For each magic method, there is a solution that does not require a magic method. For example, to override the display behaviour of an attribute, you can also extend the attribute like this:

 class helloworldAttribute extends atkAttribute
 {
   function display($record, $mode)
   {  
     return "Hello World";
   }
 }

So why should you use magic methods? Magic methods are quicker to implement, and are always node specific. They only work in the node you add the method to. If you extend an attribute, you can reuse the attribute in multiple nodes. If all you need to do is alter the display of some column in one node, a magic <attribname>_display method is less code and less overhead.

A practical example

The most commonly used magic method is <attribname>_display. It is used to alter the output of attribute values. The safest way to do this is to call the original display behaviour, and alter its output, as in the following example, which makes the text of a column bold if it contains the word 'atk':

 function content_display($record, $mode)
 {
   $attribute = &$this->getAttribute("content");
   $original = $attribute->display($record, $mode);
 
   if ($mode=="list" && strpos($original, "atk")!==false)
   {
     $original = "".$original."";
   }
 
   return $original;
 }

In this case, the $mode parameter is used to change the behaviour only in 'list' mode (recordlists, such as the admin page).

What parameters a magic method has, depends on the method. These are documented below.

List of ATK Magic Methods

<attribname>_display

Todo: show api and example

<attribname>_edit

Todo: show api and example

<attribname>_validate

Todo: show api and example

action_<action>

Todo: show api and example