Silverstripe 3.2: How to make a custom action button in the CMS to create a new Dataobject and populate it from another one - silverstripe

Question

I'm searching for a way to create a custom action button which allows me to make a new DataObject with pre-filled content from another DataObject. As a simple example: When I have an email and click the "answer"-button in my email-client, I get a new window with pre-filled content from the email before. I need exactly this functionality for my button. This button should appear next to each DataObject in the GridField.
So I know how to make a button and add it to my GridField (--> https://docs.silverstripe.org/en/3.2/developer_guides/forms/how_tos/create_a_gridfield_actionprovider/) and I know how to go to a new DataObject:
Controller::curr()->redirect($gridField->Link('item/new'));
I also found out that there is a duplicate function for DataObjects:
public function duplicate($doWrite = true) {
$className = $this->class;
$clone = new $className( $this->toMap(), false, $this->model );
$clone->ID = 0;
$clone->invokeWithExtensions('onBeforeDuplicate', $this, $doWrite);
if($doWrite) {
$clone->write();
$this->duplicateManyManyRelations($this, $clone);
}
$clone->invokeWithExtensions('onAfterDuplicate', $this, $doWrite);
return $clone;
}
Perhaps it's easier than I think but at the moment I just don't get how to rewrite this to get what I need. Can somebody give me a hint?

Answer 1

That's for sure not the cleanest solution but I think it should do the trick.
At first let's create the custom gridfield action. Here we will save all accessible records in a session and add a query string to the url so that we'll know which object we want to "clone"
public function getColumnContent($gridField, $record, $columnName) {
if(!$record->canEdit()) return;
$field = GridField_FormAction::create(
$gridField,
'clone'.$record->ID,
'Clone',
'clone',
array('RecordID' => $record->ID)
);
$values = Session::get('ClonedData');
$data = $record->data()->toMap();
if($arr = $values) {
$arr[$record->ID] = $data;
} else {
$arr = array(
$record->ID => $data
);
}
Session::set('ClonedData', $arr);
return $field->Field();
}
public function getActions($gridField) {
return array('clone');
}
public function handleAction(GridField $gridField, $actionName, $arguments, $data) {
if($actionName == 'clone') {
$id = $arguments['RecordID'];
Controller::curr()->redirect($gridField->Link("item/new/?cloneID=$id"));
}
}
after adding this new component to our gridfield,
$gridField->getConfig()->addComponent(new GridFieldCustomAction());
we'll need to bring the data into the new form. To do so, add this code directly above "return $fields" on your getCMSFields function so it will be executed every time we'll open this kind of object.
$values = Session::get('ClonedData');
if($values) {
Session::clear('ClonedData');
$json = json_encode($values);
$fields->push(LiteralField::create('ClonedData', "<div id='cloned-data' style='display:none;'>$json</div>"));
}
At the end we need to bring the content back into the fields. We'll do that with a little bit of javascript so at first you need to create a new script.js file and include it in the ss backend (or just use an existing one).
(function($) {
$('#cloned-data').entwine({
onmatch: function() {
var data = JSON.parse($(this).text()),
id = getParameterByName('cloneID');
if(id && data) {
var obj = data[id];
if(obj) {
$.each(obj, function(i, val) {
$('[name=' + i + ']').val(val);
});
}
}
}
});
// http://stackoverflow.com/questions/901115/how-can-i-get-query-string-values-in-javascript#answer-901144
function getParameterByName(name) {
name = name.replace(/[\[]/, "\\[").replace(/[\]]/, "\\]");
var regex = new RegExp("[\\?&]" + name + "=([^&#]*)"),
results = regex.exec(location.search);
return results === null ? "" : decodeURIComponent(results[1].replace(/\+/g, " "));
}
})(jQuery);
And that's it ... quite tricky. Hope it will solve your problem.