Providing Data

If you are making a new module that has data then this data will need to be requested/parsed and made available to the widget. There are two ways to do this:

• Setting a Widget Provider in the class attribute. This is a good choice if your data source does not require any special authentication flows or complex configuration.
• Handling the WidgetDataRequestEvent using a connector or custom middleware. This is necessary when you have more complex requirements, such as authentication flows; or when you can supply more than once data type.

Xibo provides an instance of DataProviderInterface to both.

The DataProvider Interface

Whether you’re using a WidgetProvider or handling the WidgetDataRequestEvent event, you will interact with the DataProviderInterface to add data items, metadata and images to your data points.

The most basic usage of the data provider will be to call addItem() for each data point needed. These should be a JsonSerializable object or key/value array per item.

Retrieving and parsing data will likely depend on module settings and properties, which can be retrieved with getSetting() and getProperty(). A Guzzle HTTP client has been provided with getGuzzleClient(), preconfigured with any proxy settings.

If the request has been handled, you must call setIsHandled() on the data provider.

Use the data provider

Using a Widget Provider

To use a widget provider a new class should be created and added to the class attribute in the module XML. This class should implement WidgetProviderInterface and add logic to the fetchData method.

Using a Connector

Create a new connector and register it with the dispatcher to handle the WidgetDataRequestEvent.

public function registerWithDispatcher(EventDispatcherInterface $dispatcher): ConnectorInterface
{
    $dispatcher->addListener(WidgetDataRequestEvent::$NAME, [$this, 'onDataRequest']);
    return $this;
}

Inside the method which will handle the event (onDataRequest in the above example) the source of the event should be tested to ensure the event is for the correct datatype/module using $event->getDataProvider()->getDataSource().

Note: is it also possible to handle the WidgetDataRequestEvent in a custom middleware, which can be useful if the user does not need to make configuration changes or otherwise see a connector in the user interface.