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In a discussion in the financial working group in the Barcelona 2019 sprint there was the idea to refactor the inefficient generation of the creditnote_id (see links below).

The general idea is to create a new hook to enable generation of various identifiers, in this instance creditnote_id and invoice_id. In the future, potentially even more (e.g. contact_external_identifier or campaign_external_identifier)

I suggest the following signature for the new hook:

  /**
   * This hook allows custom implementation for the generation
   * of various identifiers like the invoice_id or the
   * creditnote_id
   *
   * @param string $identifier  the identifier to be used, can be manipulated
   * @param string $type        currently one of 'invoice_id', 'creditnote_id'
   * @param array  $context     list of key-indexed context data, 
   * @param bool   $can_be_null true iff the resulting IDs may be NULL 
   * @return mixed
   */
  public static function generateIdentifier(&$identifier, $type, $context, $can_be_null) {
    return self::singleton()->invoke(['identifier', 'type', 'context', 'can_be_null'], $identifier, $type, $context, $can_be_null, self::$_nullObject, self::$_nullObject, 'civicrm_generateIdentifier');
  }

Related PR's:

• https://github.com/civicrm/civicrm-core/pull/11110 - closed because it is stale
• https://github.com/civicrm/civicrm-core/pull/15232 - merged
• https://github.com/civicrm/civicrm-core/pull/15235
• https://github.com/civicrm/civicrm-core/pull/16462

Related issues:

• https://issues.civicrm.org/jira/browse/CRM-21289
• financial#84