Entry save event context detection

[rob-baker-ar]

I have a case where I'm hooking into the Entry::EVENT_AFTER_SAVE event.

Documentation and methods available on the event give the ability to detect whether the event relates to a draft or a revision and by extension if neither of these, then a published element.

I need to detect the difference between different types of draft save events. Specifically, when Craft auto-saves a draft when a field is edited vs. when a user explicitly clicks the "Save Draft" button. The use case is a lower privileged user making edits and I need to notify a more privileged user when there are edits to check through and potentially publish.

If I just check for whether the entry is a Draft in the above event, the more privileged user would get an email every time any field is changed. That could be many emails, when all we really want is a single one when the save button was clicked.

It is possible (but not very robust) to look at the request object in the save event to check some parameters / headers and make a guess at context.

More generally, it would be nice to be able to get more detail on context when hooking into events.

[Mosnar]

@rob-baker-ar You could "debounce" the events using a cache key and/or a table to track whether notifications have been queued and sent for a particular element and then send those notifications on a schedule rather than immediately. You can create multiple queues in Craft or you could just use a single CLI action on a cron job to send notifications for drafts that have been saved (but not in the past 5 minutes)

[rob-baker-ar]

@Mosnar Thank you, yes, I had considered something like this - I'll have to have a chat in the office to see how urgent this is as if it's needed before 3.7 arrives, I might need to do something like that.

[brandonkelly]

This is possible as of Craft 3.7 thanks to some publishing workflow improvements (#7899). Going forward, if a draft wasn’t explicitly created by the author, it will be considered a “provisional draft”. So you can test for that:

if ($entry->isProvisionalDraft) {
    // This is a provisional draft
}

[rob-baker-ar]

Thanks @brandonkelly I'm hoping we can hang on for 3.7 - this seems a preferable route.

[brandonkelly]

@rob-baker-ar It’s in Beta currently, and the stable release is scheduled for Tuesday ;)

[rob-baker-ar]

For anyone looking back at this, $entry->getIsProvisional() is now deprecated in favour of the property: $entry->isProvisionalDraft

[brandonkelly]

@rob-baker-ar Doh, thanks. Just updated the example.