Preparing Sugar customizations for PHP 5.6 and 7.0

Post originally written by avlasovsugar.

Alex Vlasov is an experienced Sugar Developer and contractor that works on the SugarCRM Engineering platform team. In this post, Alex shares advice to Sugar Developers for preparing their Sugar customizations for PHP 5.6 and PHP 7.

The Sugar team has been preparing core Sugar code for PHP 5.6 and PHP 7 support with an eye on deprecating support for older PHP versions. This means there are some actions that the Sugar Developer community needs to take in order to prepare their code for latest versions of PHP.

Summary of core Sugar app changes

In order to support newer versions of PHP, we made some changes to internal core classes that Sugar Developers need to know about. Many of these changes were made in Sugar 7.7.1 when we added PHP 5.6 support. Other changes outlined below are in upcoming Sugar releases.

PHP 7 deprecated features removed from core Sugar code

1. Removed static calls to non-static methods
2. Removed PHP4-style constructors

Read the full list of features deprecated in PHP7.

Additional changes to address core Sugar code hygiene and to adopt new PHP 7 features

1. Fixed incompatible child class methods signatures
2. Updated 3rd party libraries to support latest versions of PHP
3. Changes to support PHP 7.0 new uniform variable syntax
4. Adopted PHP 7's CSPRNG API but added random_compat library to support older PHP versions

Actions for Sugar Developers

In order to properly upgrade custom code, two main tasks need to be performed:

Make your code compatible with PHP 5.6 and PHP 7.0

To make your code compatible with PHP 5.6 and 7.0, use the following checklist.

1. Remove static calls to non-static methods within your PHP code
2. Remove any use of PHP4-style constructors within your PHP code
3. Remove other deprecated PHP functionality in your PHP code (PHP 5.6 deprecated features, PHP 7 deprecated features)

For example,

class Foo {

public function __construct() { // Yes.
// ...
}

public function Foo() { // No.
// ...
}

    public static function aStaticMethod() {
        // ...
    }

    public function aNormalMethod() {
    // ...
    }

}

Foo::aStaticMethod(); // Yes.

Foo::aNormalMethod(); // No.

For additional detail, refer to PHP migration guides for PHP 5.6 and PHP 7.0.

Make your code compatible with changes to Sugar PHP APIs

To make custom code compatible with updated Sugar PHP APIs, use the following checklist.

1. (7.7.1) Do not use old PHP4 constructors in Sugar PHP classes, they are removed as part of PHP 7.0 support.
2. (7.7.1) If there is code that extends Sugar PHP classes, make sure child methods signatures are correct
3. (7.7.1) 3rd party libraries were moved:
   1. parsecsv library was moved to the vendor directory
4. (future) 3rd party libraries updates:
   1. Elastica library will be upgraded, so make sure you do not use deprecated Elastica APIs.
   2. Removal of mcrypt support and Crypt_Blowfish library, so make sure you are not calling these libraries directly.
5. (future) Significant changes to be made to the following Sugar PHP APIs:
   1. ActivitiesApi::getQueryObject() will become protected and function arguments are changed
   2. RelationshipHandler class will stop extending Relationship class
   3. SearchForm class will not extend EditView class anymore
   4. Quarter*TimePeriod::buildLeaves() methods will have function arguments changed
   5. PMSEEngineFilterApi::addFieldFilter() method will be renamed