Add Joomla 4 compatibility to CRM_Utils_System_Joomla::loadUser()

[webmaster-cses-org-uk]

Overview

This PR proposes a fix to the issue https://lab.civicrm.org/dev/core/-/issues/5645, where it was found that cron jobs running via cli.php are not compatible with Joomla 4.

Before

Running a cron job on Joomla 4 results in process failure with the following error message:

Symfony\Component\ErrorHandler\Error\UndefinedMethodError {#2612
  #message: "Attempted to call an undefined method named "login" of class "Joomla\CMS\Application\ConsoleApplication"."
  #code: 0
  #file: "./public_html/administrator/components/com_civicrm/civicrm/CRM/Utils/System/Joomla.php"
  #line: 483
  trace: {
    ./public_html/administrator/components/com_civicrm/civicrm/CRM/Utils/System/Joomla.php:483 {
      CRM_Utils_System_Joomla->loadUser($username, $password = null)
      ›   //perform the login action
      ›   $instance->login($params);
      › }
    }
    ./public_html/administrator/components/com_civicrm/civicrm/bin/cli.class.php:269 { …}
    ./public_html/administrator/components/com_civicrm/civicrm/bin/cli.class.php:67 { …}
    ./public_html/administrator/components/com_civicrm/civicrm/bin/cli.php:16 { …}
  }
}

After

Cron job completes successfully.

Technical Details

This has been tested using CiviCRM 5.78.3 on Joomla 4.4.9. The proposed code change is based heavily on the suggestion made in this discussion (https://groups.google.com/g/joomla-dev-general/c/55J2s9hhMxA?pli=1), which replicates the object instantiation code used in Joomla's includes/app.php. It then needed some further require_once directives to get this to work.

Comments

This is ONLY a workaround / temporary fix, as it does not address the wider Joomla 4/5/6 compatibility issues such as using deprecated naming conventions and methods. Furthermore, the need for alias() is a temporary bridging arrangement during the transitions between Joomla 3 and 5 (possibly 6).

As such, this issue will need to be revisited later. This will still NOT work with Joomla 5 or above.

[civibot]

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[seamuslee001]

@webmaster-cses-org-uk I'm thinking this is probably sensible in a cron.php context but does it still make sense if Joomla has already been booted does it cause any issues you think?

@demeritcowboy @totten you folks might now if we do require_once on files that might have already been included by joomla would there be warnings/issues emitted by PHP?

[demeritcowboy]

I can't see how it would give a warning.
Regarding the timing of it I don't know enough (anything) about joomla to comment.

[webmaster-cses-org-uk]

@seamuslee001 I guess we shouldn't really be calling cron.php if Joomla is already booted but we could put some sort of condition round it to guard against double-initialisation (e.g. check for _JEXEC defined already or something like that). What I would say is this whole file is going to require a major rewrite for Joomla 5, all I've done here is a quick fix, but I could look at putting an extra condition round lines 499-512.

[webmaster-cses-org-uk]

Sorry forgot to mention... I did check and as far as I could tell this method is only called from cron.php, but that's not a reason/excuse not to make it robust like you suggest!

[webmaster-cses-org-uk]

OK 3rd reply then I must leave this for a bit!

Having had a closer look, there is already some similar code in loadBootStrap() in the same file, which looks like it may be called before loadUser() in cli.class.php. However that loads either the ConsoleApplication (which does not have the login() method - hence why cli.php fails) or the AdministratorApplication (which does have login() but for whatever reason we seem to want the site here - maybe this is wrong / not necessary?).

So with this change we actually would be overwriting the initialisation done in loadBootStrap() - although it seems to work fine - so I would suggest that the actual fix is to harmonise these somehow so that the correct application object is available when needed.