Chapter 6. Admin Controllers and Hooks

Our mymodcomments module is almost complete, but we are missing an important part—we can't administrate comments yet.

In this chapter, you will learn about admin controllers and admin hooks. The admin controllers permit you to add new tabs in your back office and hooks allow you to display information or add features to existing tabs.

We will first create an admin controller that will display the list of comments. We will then use hooks to display comments associated with a product (in the admin product tab) and a customer (in the admin customer tab).

In this chapter, we will see how to do the following:

• Add an admin controller

• Use back office hooks

Adding an admin controller

An admin controller has some native methods that permit you to administrate a selected ObjectModel class. As you will see in the following section, creating an admin tab that uses main Create, Read, Update, and Delete (CRUD) actions is very easy.

Adding and installing a new tab to your admin panel

Firstly, we will create a new file named AdminMyModCommentsController.php and we will place it in controllers/admin/ of our module's directory. The file will contain a controller named AdminMyModCommentsController that extends ModuleAdminController:

<?php
class AdminMyModCommentsController extends ModuleAdminController
{

}

Next, we will create a new tab in our back office. You could do so using the admin panel by navigating to Administration | Menus; but, it's not really a plug and play module if merchants have to add the tab themselves. This is why we will add a new method named installTab in our module's main class in mymodcomments.php.

We saw what an ObjectModel class...

Using back office hooks

Admin controllers are useful to create a new tab. However, if you need to alter existing tabs, you will need to use hooks in the back office. In this section, we will use only some of the hooks available. It is recommended that you read the exhaustive list of hooks at the end of the book to see all the various possibilities.

Attaching your module to a product hook

The product administration tool is composed of several sub tabs. There is a hook that permits you to add subtabs on this section: displayAdminProductsExtra.

To do so, you just have to register the hook in the constructor of your main class, (mymodcomments.php):

// Register hooks
if (!$this->registerHook('displayProductTabContent') ||
  !$this->registerHook('displayBackOfficeHeader') ||
  !$this->registerHook('displayAdminProductsExtra') ||
  !$this->registerHook('ModuleRoutes'))
    return false;

You will then create the corresponding method using the same controller system as other hooks:

public function...

Summary

In this chapter, we saw how to create and install AdminController with our module. You learned how to use admin hooks and make Ajax requests in the administration panel.

In the next chapter, we will do something completely new: we will create a carrier module.