Connector Services

New versions of all Connector services-related extensions are on their way to the TER.

The main change is that each type of Connector service can now provide a sample configuration. This configuration is read by the Connector BE module and is preloaded when a service is selected. This helps in not forgetting some configuration parameter.

Providing a sample configuration is easy. It is a sample text file, which must be located in Resources/Public/Samples/Configuration.txt

Under the hood, the BE module has been entirely rewritten with Extbase. It also provides a new option for changing the output format, either raw, XML string or PHP array. This makes it even easier to test connector services, in particular when developing a new service.

The various services each received some bug fixes and small enhancements. Their compatibility with TYPO3 4.7 was verified and the required TYPO3 version was raised to 4.5 for all services.

A new version of Connector Services was released today which adds a new method to the svconnector API. This method is called postProcessOperations() and is meant to be called by the same process that originally called the connector, when said process has finished doing its own job.

The method itself does nothing, but provides a hook with which functions may be registered to perform whatever specific task may be needed at the end of a process.

In addition to that the code in the existing "sv1" service was moved to a base class, which is cleaner since this extension does not actually provide any service. Only a base upon which to develop Connector-type services. The "sv1" was preserved as an empty shell extending the new base class, so backward compatibility is ensured.

A new version of "Connector Services - CSV" was released alongside, with corrected inheritance to the new base class. It status was raised to "stable" as it has been in use for months now, without problems.

The newly released version of Connector Services represents a stabilization of the extension. The API has not changed a lot, but it can now be considered final. Examples of hook usage when implementing a connector service were added to the base service and the manual was improved with instructions for the developers.

Also released today is extension "svconnector_csv", an implementation of connector services for reading CSV or similar flat files. This provides developers with a standardized way of reading flat files, which can be used in any extension.