What's the best practice for Magento dependencies?

Question

Synopsis

I have a question regarding the best practices with Magento dependencies. Essentially I have a custom module that overrides Mage_Adminhtml_Catalog_ProductController this currently works providing I include the Magento core class prior to extending (generally what you'd expect).

My code looks something along the lines of:

<?php

require_once Mage::getModuleDir('controllers', 'Mage_Adminhtml') . DS . 'Catalog/ProductController.php';

class Vendor_Module_Adminhtml_Catalog_ProductController
    extends Mage_Adminhtml_Catalog_ProductController
{
    // My things go here.
}

My question is simply to understand if theres a nicer method of including core classes for overriding (see example)?

Example

require_once Mage::getModuleDir('controllers', 'Mage_Adminhtml') . DS . 'Catalog/ProductController.php';

Answer 1

For Controllers, there is no nicer way unfortunately, you need to use require_once or something like that. You should replace all occurences of / with DS though (one / is still in your sample code).

If you are overriding Models, Blocks or Helpers, you won't need it, as the overwritten classes get autoloaded.

Answer 2

This is an example of overriding a core controller class

In your custom modules config.xml file put the following code.

<config>
        <admin>
            <routers>
                <adminhtml>
                    <args>
                        <modules>
                            <Vendor_Module before="Mage_Adminhtml">Vendor_Module_Adminhtml</Vendor_Module >
                        </modules>
                    </args>
                </adminhtml>
            </routers>
        </admin>
    </config>

Then the your controller class will be like this.

<?php
require_once 'Mage/Adminhtml/controllers/Catalog/ProductController.php';
class Vendor_Module_Adminhtml_Catalog_ProductController
    extends Mage_Adminhtml_Catalog_ProductController
{

// your code

}