Attention

TYPO3 v8 has reached its end-of-life March 31st, 2020 and is not maintained by the community anymore.

You can order Extended Long Term Support (ELTS) here: TYPO3 ELTS.

Custom transformations API

Instead of using the built-in transformations of TYPO3 you can program your own. This is done by creating a PHP class with two methods for transformation. Additionally you have to define a key (like "css_transform") for your transformation so you can refer to it in the configuration of Rich Text Editors.

Custom transformation key

You should pick a custom transformation key prefixed by tx_, something like tx_[extension key]_[suffix]. The key must not contain dashes.

Note

If you pick one of the default transformation keys (except the meta-transformations) you will actually override it and your transformation will be called instead!

Registering the transformation key in the system

In ext_localconf.php, simply set a $GLOBALS['TYPO3_CONF_VARS'] variable to point to the class which contains the transformation methods:

$GLOBALS['TYPO3_CONF_VARS']['SC_OPTIONS']['t3lib/class.t3lib_parsehtml_proc.php']['transformation']['tx_examples_transformation']
   = 'Documentation\Examples\Service\RteTransformation';

Here the transformation key is defined to be tx_examples_transformation and the value is the fully qualified class name.

This class must contain two public methods, transform_db() and transform_rte().

It must also contain two public variables called by TYPO3 Core (this is an old part, which doesn't use a proper API):

  • $pObj which will contain an instance of \TYPO3\CMS\Core\Html\RteHtmlParser.

  • $transformationKey which should contain your transformation's key (in this case tx_examples_transformation).

Code listing

This code listing shows a simple transformation. When content is delivered to the RTE it will add a <hr/> tag to the end of the content. When the content is stored in the database any <hr/> tag at the end of the content will be removed and substituted with whitespace.

class RteTransformation {
   /**
    * NOTE: must be public as it is accessed by \TYPO3\CMS\Core\Html\RteHtmlParser without API
    *
    * @var \TYPO3\CMS\Core\Html\RteHtmlParser
    */
   public $pObj;

   /**
    * NOTE: must be public as it is accessed by \TYPO3\CMS\Core\Html\RteHtmlParser without API
    *
    * @var string
    */
   public $transformationKey = 'tx_examples_transformation';

   /**
    * @var array
    */
   protected $configuration;

   /**
    * Loads the transformation's configuration
    *
    * @return void
    */
   protected function loadConfiguration() {
      $this->configuration = $this->pObj->procOptions['usertrans.'][$this->transformationKey . '.'];
   }

   /**
    * Transforms RTE content prior to database storage
    *
    * @param string $value RTE HTML to clean for database storage
    * @return string
    */
   public function transform_db($value) {
      $this->loadConfiguration();

      if ($this->configuration['addHrulerInRTE'])    {
         $value = preg_replace('/<hr[[:space:]]*[\/]>[[:space:]]*$/i', '', $value);
      }

      return $value;
   }

   /**
    * Transforms database content for RTE display
    *
    * @param string $value Database content to transform into RTE-ready HTML
    * @return string
    */
   public function transform_rte($value) {
      $this->loadConfiguration();

      if ($this->configuration['addHrulerInRTE'])    {
         $value .= '<hr/>';
      }

      return $value;
   }
}
  • The transformation methods transform_rte and transform_db take a single argument which is the value to transform. They have to return that value again, modified as needed.

  • Notice that both transformation functions call initConfig() which uses the reference to the parser object to retrieve configuration related to the custom transformation.