Development Guide: make your entity available for import/export

In this guide I will show how you can make your custom entity able to be exported and imported with Configuration Loader extension.

This guide is based on the Phone Input Mask extension which provides its own entity for defining valid input masks for phone numbers.

Requirements

The steps below require that API version 4 is available for our entity.

Step 1: Create a compiler pass

Create the file Civi\PhoneInputMask\CompilerPass.php with the following contents:

namespace Civi\PhoneInputMask;

use Civi\ConfigItems\Entity\Factory;
use Symfony\Component\DependencyInjection\Compiler\CompilerPassInterface;
use Symfony\Component\DependencyInjection\ContainerBuilder;
use Symfony\Component\DependencyInjection\Definition;

class CompilerPass implements CompilerPassInterface {

  public function process(ContainerBuilder $container) {
    if ($container->hasDefinition('civiconfig_entity_factory')) {
      $container->getDefinition('civiconfig_entity_factory')
        ->addMethodCall('addEntityDefinition', [new Definition('\Civi\ConfigItems\Entity\SimpleEntity\Definition', ['PhoneInputMask']), Factory::EARLY_PRIORITY]);
    }
  }

}

Step 2: make the compiler pass known

Make sure the compiler pass is loaded by editing phoneinputmask.php and add the following hook:

/**
 * Implements hook_civicrm_container()
 *
 * @link https://docs.civicrm.org/dev/en/latest/hooks/hook_civicrm_container/
 */
function phoneinputmask_civicrm_container($container) {
  $container->addCompilerPass(new Civi\PhoneInputMask\CompilerPass());
}

Explanation

In the CompilerPass we pass on the API version 4 entity name of our entity. That way the CiviCRM Configuration Loader knows that this entity can be exported and imported.