TYPO3 Core

Agreed... the preProcess hook is in my eyes non-sense, it just delivers the field configuration and there's even no possibility to really pre-process the value.

Patch set 1 for branch master has been pushed to the review server.
It is available at http://review.typo3.org/16405

In preProcessValue you can manipulate the TCA (which will then be applied in the next step). If you are still not happy with the result, you use postProcessValue (which gets the $value and $theColConf) to manipulate the value itself afterwads. So no change is required.

The preProcessValue is indeed useless as it doesn't get the name of the column that is being handled, only "some TCA snippet" (impossible to guess for sure which field it is).

We won't add more hook APIs to 4.5, but we could add a new more useful hook for 6.2 (current master). So please focus this issue on that (new hook), and deprecate the the "old hook" - who knows who might have used it??? - on the way.

So I've changed this to a Feature request and adapted the subject to it. Open new review requests as soon you have a new suggestion.

Thanks for understanding!

Patch set 1 for branch master of project Packages/TYPO3.CMS has been pushed to the review server.
It is available at https://review.typo3.org/c/Packages/TYPO3.CMS/+/63877

Applied in changeset 38ac27e2d216708c0baa644a167c343d8a423a0d.