Make it easier to extend existing plugins

ergonlogic → changed the visibility of the branch 3432502-extend-existing-plugins to hidden.

ergonlogic → changed the visibility of the branch 3432502-extend-plugins to hidden.

The 2.0.x branch has drifted too far from 1.1.x for me to be able to develop my extension against it without significant refactoring. I need my plugin to work against the current stable release, so I'm going to start a new branch forked from 1.1.x.

As a starting point, branch 3432502-1.1.x-extend-existing-plugins now allows extension of eca_access plugins using the technique described above.

I've also attached a patch to make it simpler to incorporate into a `composer.json` file.

Re-rolled the patch, since it included the fix from 🐛 ECA Access: Incorrect field name in "Determining entity field access" plugin Needs work

whitespace fix

Third time's a charm.

I like this improvement, but we can only make use of it if it gets developed against 2.0.x from where it could then be backported, once completed.

Right. ECA is becoming a key piece of our Drupal stack, so I'm sure that I'll have a chance (hopefully over the summer) to refactor this against 2.0.x.

Some notes on possible future improvements to this:

• Abstract the underlying implementation to pass the class name as a parameter
• Move that method into a trait (or base class) for easier re-use across the rest of ECA (it currently only applies to eca_access)
• Add some static caching to minimize performance impact.
• Add some docs to show how easy it has become to extend existing plugins.

Also worth noting here: we could not get our extended access plugin to interact properly with the upstream one.

For background, the idea was to use the field access plugin (from eca_access) to forbid access to all fields, then use our plugin (that extends the field access one) to allow access during some workflow steps (in combination with other conditions).

While we could accomplish something similar (minus the workflow bit) with just the upstream plugin, we needed to use our extended one for both parts (forbid then allow), in order for this to work.

We think this might have something to do with the order that the hook_entity_field_access() are being evaluated or how the Symfony EventDispatcher sorted events. But we haven't yet been able to determine the root cause of this.