Extending Magento Gotcha

Well – it has to be said that I thoroughly enjoy Magento development, but today I came across an issue I’d never seen before.

This problem is down to extending Magento to observe certain events in the administration interface, call it hooking into events or whatever – but your essentially observing events which are triggered within Magento – these events then call your code and you can then manipulate Magento to your hearts content.

The problem I experienced was very simple. I just couldn’t work out why my code was not being triggered by an event. I knew that the event existed, and that my code was sound, and that my module config was correct. However in my method signature I had explicitly set the data type I was expecting, and the data type that Varien (the company who develops Magento) had documented – so my method signature should have been the following

public function emailSupplierFromInvoicePayment(Varian_Object $ob)
{
        die("event-trace");
}

When I’d actually set it to:

public function emailSupplierFromInvoicePayment(Varian_Event_Observer $ob)
{
        die("event-trace");
}

So much for explicit declaration.