Is It Possible To Add A 'comment' Programmatically?

[applab]

I have a template which includes a "comments" field using the core Comments field type (FieldtypeComments)

Is there a way to post a comment to a page which uses this field, programmatically, from a different page?, ie. not the current $page.

something along the lines of:

$my_comment = array(
    'cite' => $comment_cite,
    'text' => $comment_text,
    'created' => $comment_date
);

$p = $pages->get('my-selector');
$p->comments->add($my_comment);    // no such method!

tia.

[teppo]

Something like this should work (assuming that the name of your comments field is 'comments'):

$comment = new Comment;
$comment->text = "my text";
$comment->cite = "my name";
// etc.

$p = $pages->get('/about/');
$p->comments->add($comment);
$p->save('comments');

[applab]

thanks Teppo, worked great after 1 amendment:

on first attempt I got an error:

"Error: Exception: Can't save field from page 1028: /blog/posts/test-post/: Call $page->setOutputFormatting(false) before getting/setting values that will be modified and saved."

so, I did as the error suggested end ended up with:

$comment = new Comment;
$comment->text = "my text";
$comment->cite = "my name";
// etc.

$p = $pages->get('/about/');
$p->setOutputFormatting(false);    // added
$p->comments->add($comment);
$p->save('comments');

checking the PW cheatsheet for $page->setOutputFormatting() makes it clear why that's needed.

[ttbb]

Maybe my question fits in here ...

I'm working on a larger migration procedure from Drupal 7 to PW, and my progress makes me optimistic about achieving my goal 🙂

I have some Drupal content types with comments attached, and want to add them programmatically while creating PW pages from the imported content.
The comments from Drupal are incoming as a flat array with an item "comment_parent_id". If it's not zero, it's a reply to another comment and shows the ID of the respective comment.

I didn't find anything about how such a nested comment is added to a page.
Please, can anyone shed some light on how nested comments are working API-wise?

Thanks a lot!
Thomas

[applab]

11 years later, where does the time go!!

disclaimer: I haven't tried this but glancing at the API docs it looks possible...

from this page
https://processwire.com/api/ref/fieldtype-comments/add-comment/

we see the addComment() method

$bool = $fieldtypeComments->addComment(Page $page, Field $field, Comment $comment, bool $send);

this accepts a (fully populated) Comment object as one of it's parameters. If we look at the API docs for the comment class
https://processwire.com/api/ref/comment/

it has properties `id` & `parent_id`

So (I'm guessing) if you add a comment you can retrieve it's `id` property to use as a `parent_id` on a subsequent comment.

HTH,
Martin.

[ttbb]

thanks a lot, @applab 🙂👍

your hints helped a lot.

while proceeding and making progress the next questions pop up:
do I need an existing (saved) page object to attach my comments to or can I add the comments to the new (unsaved) page object? this would allow me to do the page creation in one run and to avoid a later loop for attaching the comment.

and: do I need to use a new comment array before attaching this to the page?

[applab]

16 hours ago, ttbb said:

this would allow me to do the page creation in one run and to avoid a later loop for attaching the comment.

As I understand it, in order to save a comment you need to save the page the comments field is attached to, and given that you will need to save a comment in order to retrieve it's id for use as a parent_id in later calls you will be calling $page->save() multiple times for each post, but this won't require a "later loop for attaching the comment", you only need to iterate your posts once.

16 hours ago, ttbb said:

and: do I need to use a new comment array before attaching this to the page?

you don't need an array to hold the comments , if that's what you mean, you use a reference to the comments field attached to the page

$myPage->comments->addComment(Page $page, Field $field, Comment $comment, bool $send);

you will need to create a new comment object to be passed in to the addComment() call.