Posting remotely - to fields in a channel or a plugin's fields?

Question

Been looking at porting a site from EE to Craft.

We have a custom module that accepts a POST and then stores that data in fields in a particular channel. The mappings are stored in extension settings so there are no hardcoded field IDs in the module code.

In Craft, how would we go about that? I can see that we'd need to have a controller method that would be publicly accessibly but am unsure if we can easily use Entries or if we need a custom table with fields, field layout etc.

The use case is a job board. Jobs are just entries in that they have a job title, body, summary, salary range, blah blah blah, and CMS users should be able to create jobs in Craft, so just a channel looks fine. The only addition is that a third party needs to post data to the channel to create jobs too, hence the need for the plugin.

Can you please advise the best approach here? The bit I'm stuck on is either creating mappings in the plugin settings that link the posted data with fields created in the channel, or on showing a template where the CMS user can create and edit jobs using the standard Craft field layout UI.

Hope that all makes sense!

Thanks

Answer 1

I'm not sure if this is the 'best' approach, but you can definitely accomplish this without creating your own tables, unless you have some other specific need. In your plugin defineSettings method you could either define individual fields (if the entry fields are predetermined) or a table field (if both the post data and entry fields should be configurable) to store field mappings. In your public controller method you can then map the post data to your entry's fields via the settings that you defined, perform other security/data checks, etc. and save the entry.

In the plugin's controller:

public function actionSaveJob()
{    
    // get 'post to field' mappings from plugin settings
    $pluginSettings = craft()->plugins->getPlugin('JobPostPlugin')->getSettings();
    $titlePostVar   = $pluginSettings->titlePostVar;
    $bodyPostVar    = $pluginSettings->bodyPostVar;
    $summaryPostVar = $pluginSettings->summaryPostVar;

    // retrieve post data
    $title   = craft()->request->getPost($titlePostVar);
    $body     = craft()->request->getPost($bodyPostVar);
    $summary = craft()->request->getPost($summaryPostVar);

    // create a new entry
    $entry = new EntryModel(); 
    $entry->sectionId  = 2; 
    $entry->typeId     = 2; 
    $entry->authorId   = 1; 
    $entry->enabled    = true;

    // set entry content
    $entry->getContent()->setAttributes(array(     
        'title'     => $title,     
        'body'      => $body,
        'summary'   => $summary, 
    ));

    // save the entry
    $success = craft()->entries->saveEntry($entry);
}

Completely untested, but should be more or less correct. If anyone sees an error please comment or feel free to edit.

You would also want to add conditions to ensure that the post data exists and that it is formatted correctly, and that whatever security conditions you've established are met, and perhaps record/return success and or errors.

For simplicity I have shown this all happening in a controller action, however, I think the recommended approach would be to separate this between a controller and a corresponding service, so that the controller is never actually modifying the DB.