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Updated alterReportVars or new hook for reports
There is no way to currently change a core report to get it to expose custom fields for a component if it does not do it already. It's not unusual an unusual use case to combine creating a custom field with exposing it in a core report. What's needed is to be able to use a hook to add values to $_customGroupExtends. This would also allow extensions to define their own custom fields and add them to a report.
The alterReportVar hook is one place where this functionality could be added https://docs.civicrm.org/dev/en/latest/hooks/hook_civicrm_alterReportVar/. The current three supported varTypes, columns, rows and sql, could be extended by a new one, customFields, or some similar name.
There has been criticism in the past of this hook. IIRC @eileen the concern was especially around how it was not well designed for the sql argument, but I don't recall the details. Perhaps it was that the hook was trying to do too many things and provided too broad a surface.
Rather than further complexifying this hook, an alternative approach would be to create a new one focussed exclusively on the issue of changing custom field exposed by a report. Perhaps it could be call alterReportCustomFields.
So we'd like feedback on
- Should there be hook support for changing the custom fields exposed by reports?
- If so, should we change alterReportVar or create a new hook, alterReportCustomFields?