How to add a New Task to your Joomla 3 Component

This tutorial series, Joomla 3 component development, is currently in progress…

So far in this tutorial series for creating a component in Joomla 3, we’ve created views and we’ve created formats. The next feature of components we’re going to review is tasks.

What is a task?

A task is, well… something that can be done. The usage of “tasks” when developing components in Joomla is what it sounds like.

display() is the default task

If you do not specify a task, the default task display() will be executed. The screenshot below demonstrates this in action. When we echo the task to the screen, it is blank (meaning it is not set). Because there is no task set, the default() task / function is then executed.

How to add a new task

Adding a new task to your component is actually quite easy. Here are the steps.

1. Decide on a task nameIn our testing, we are going to create a task named shout.
2. Add a function named after your task within your component’s controller classSince we’re creating a shout task, we need to create a function named shout() and add it to our controller’s class. Below is our controller.php file, with the new code we added to it highlighted in red.

   <?php // No direct access to this file defined('_JEXEC') or die('Restricted access');   // import Joomla controller library jimport('joomla.application.component.controller');   /**  * Hello World Component Controller  */ class HelloWorldController extends JControllerLegacy {   function shout()   {     echo "<p>THIS IS ME SHOUTING!</p>";   } }

Testing your new task

We’re testing our new task by calling it in the URL. To do this, we’re passing the task variable via the URL and setting it to shout, as in:

https://example.com/index.php?option=com_helloworld&task=shout

In the screenshot below, you can see our new task in action: