How to get CiviCRM Views to work in Drupal 8 with separate CiviCRM database

Question

When setting up a Drupal 8 with separate CiviCRM database, the Drupal views cannot read the CiviCRM database:

SQLSTATE[42S02]: Base table or view not found: 1146 Table 'xxx.civicrm_contact' doesn't exist: SELECT civicrm_contact.id AS id, civicrm_contact.organization_name AS civicrm_contact_organization_name FROM {civicrm_contact} civicrm_contact LIMIT 11 OFFSET 0; Array ( )

Checking the civicrm_views module I suppose there are some changes needed in the civicrm_views_views_data() function to connect to the right database for the CiviCRM data.

I also tried to create a view based on entities from the CiviCRM Entity module, but have the same error there.

Anybody got this working or has some hints how to do it?

Answer 1

I had the same problem today, so I looked in the source code.

In civicrm.install there's a function called _civicrm_get_db_config. It's looking in the $databases array for an element with a key civicrm. So I added this to settings.php:

$databases['civicrm']['default'] = array (
  'database' => 'civi_db_name',
  'username' => 'mysqluser',
  'password' => 'redacted',
  'prefix' => '',
  'host' => 'localhost',
  'port' => '3306',
  'namespace' => 'Drupal\\Core\\Database\\Driver\\mysql',
  'driver' => 'mysql',
);

I then had to clear all caches before it worked, but work it does.

Answer 2

You can use the data processor extension (https://lab.civicrm.org/extensions/dataprocessor) for that. The data processor is an extension for CiviCRM which gets data from CiviCRM and exposes this to the API (it is possible to add your own outputs, e.g, csv file, page etc..)

At the Drupal side you need the CiviMRF Core Module (https://github.com/CiviMRF/cmrf_core). The CiviMRF is capable of connecting to an external civicrm and with cmrf_views you can setup views to retrieve data from the CiviCRM API.

With the data processor you can create your own custom API's (or views).

All this is still work in progress but functional working. I hope to write a blog post on how the data processor works with Drupal views in the near future.

This will also work when CiviCRM is installed in the same Drupal environment. The CMRF core module provides a 'local' connection.