synonyms_behavior_implementation.html in Synonyms 7

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<p>At this point you must possess good technical knowledge about what synonyms behaviors are. In this article we will show how you can implement an arbitrary behavior for an arbitrary storage.</p>

<p>By implementing I mean to provide integration between your storage and a synonym behavior (how that behavior requires to work with synonyms data). It must sound a bit too baked, but the ongoing paragraphs should shed more light onto it.</p>

<p>Throughout writing your own synonyms behavior implementation you can always look into Synonyms module source code to get better understanding. You will find the behavior implementations in <em>synonyms/synonyms_provider_{property,field}/includes/*SynonymsBehavior.class.inc</em> files.</p>

<p>Just one last question before we dive into technical details: is your storage eventually comes from a field? In case it does, you might benefit from reading <a href="&topic:synonyms/synonyms_behavior_implementation_field_based&">this page</a> as it narrates about implementing behaviors based on fields. You can leverage some abstractions from synonyms_provider_field submodule to make your life easier.</p>

<p>In case your storage is not field-based or you just happen to be Chuck Norris, read on! Creating a new implementation pretty much consists of 2 steps:</p>
<ol>
    <li>Implementing behavior interface for a particular storage type.</li>
    <li>Notifying Synonyms module about your new behavior implementation, that is... for what behavior and what entity type and bundle you have implemented it.</li>
</ol>

<p>Now let us see each of the steps in further details.</p>

<h2>Implementing behavior interface</h2>

<p>Look up in behavior cTools plugin definition of your interest what interface it declares. The cTools plugin must be of type <em>behavior</em> owned by <em>synonyms</em> module. The interface is declared under the <em>interface</em> property of the plugin definition. Read the documentation for that interface and write a PHP class that implements this interface for your particular storage. We cannot give more precise instructions about this step, because it all depends on the interface of the behavior.</p>

<h2>Notifying Synonyms module about your new implementation</h2>

<p>For the purposes of such notification we have the following hook in Synonyms module:</p>

<ul>
    <li><em>hook_synonyms_behavior_implementation_info()</em> to collect info from modules about existing behavior implementations</li>
</ul>

<p>Implementing the hook is highly straight forward, you will just inform the Synonyms module about what behavior implementations your module has to offer for a given behavior, entity type, and bundle. For more details, refer to <b>synonyms.api.php</b> file.</p>