The RAD tools tour: Setup > RAD #

Tutorial 1. Setup > RAD (/setup/rad, policy setup/setup) is the administration's toolbox for extension developers. It is three things: a catalogue of every place the system can be extended, a survey of what this installation really exposes, and a set of wizards that write working extensions. This tour shows each; the facts come from kernel/setup/expradcatalogue.php, expradsurvey.php, expradhealth.php and the wizard classes beside them.

1. The catalogue #

Open /setup/rad. The page's title is "Rapid Application Development Tools", and it says what it is: "Every point this system can be extended at is listed below: what it is for, where the code goes, and what registers it."

Each entry shows:

The entries are in seven groups: Content; Templates and design; Modules and views; Workflow, events and jobs; Storage and infrastructure; Packaging and shop; Users, access and language. Three filters (from expRADCatalogue::filters()):

The Find field narrows the list as you type (a name, a setting, a class, a file). The same catalogue, as text, is Extension points.

2. The survey #

The catalogue is written by hand; the Extension point survey (/setup/radsurvey) is read off disk on every request. It counts, with a link to the entries behind every number:

Use it to answer "is there already a hook for this?" before you write one. A section can be linked: /setup/radsurvey/(show)/<section>. The generated reference is The extension surface.

3. The health check #

The RAD page also runs expRADHealth::findings(): settings that name a class that cannot be loaded, a directory searched that is not there, a design extension without a design, a view without a script, a datatype offered and not found, and more, each with how to fix it. After installing or writing an extension, read it.

4. How every wizard works #

All wizards share one flow (kernel/setup/expextensionwizard.php):

1. The extension: extension name, class name, title, summary, author, Composer vendor, version, license.
2. What goes in it: the parts to write (for a datatype: editing, class settings, default value, naming objects, searchable, sortable, text in and out, information collector, files, packages, version differences, on publish and more; each part is a group of methods that only make sense together).
3. What will be written: the methods or templates, each with a note on what the kernel calls it for.
4. Switching it on: the exact lines to add to settings/override/site.ini.append.php, and Then (regenerate the autoloads, clear the caches).
5. Every file, before it is written: the full content of every file, with line and byte counts. Refresh preview after a change.
6. Create in extension/ writes the files, or Download as zip gives you the same files as an archive. When the web server cannot write into extension/, the page says so and offers only the archive.

Guards you can rely on (RAD tools: security): nothing is written outside extension/<name>, an existing extension is never overwritten, typed values cannot break out of comments or INI lines, generated templates escape output and generated views validate input.

5. The wizards #

6. After any wizard #

./console exp:ini add 'site.ini/ExtensionSettings/ActiveExtensions[]' <name> global
php bin/php/ezpgenerateautoloads.php -e
php bin/php/ezcache.php --clear-all
php bin/php/checkclasses.php --quiet-ok

Then read the generated README.md: every wizard writes one describing what it wrote and how to continue, plus doc/examples.php with ready-to-run examples for most kinds.

Related pages #

• Previous: Tutorials: build real extensions step by step
• Next: With RAD: a template operator in five minutes
• RAD tools
• Free documentation: this page is free to copy, translate and improve under the GNU FDL 1.3.