Best practices for extending the Connector | Magento Order Management Documentation (Archived)

See our best practices for extending and working with the Connector so that you can get the most out of your Order Management System (OMS) + Connector + Magento Commerce (MC) installation!

Following our best practices also ensures your future ability to upgrade and manage the Connector to best suit your e-commerce and order management needs.

To extend the functionality of the Connector you should use the same best practices approaches as for Magento core module extensions.

General recommendations

Our recommended best practices for extending and customizing the Connector include:

Use plugins to modify the Connector functionality.
Do not use the original method’s arguments, if possible, to avoid backward incompatibility issues if the original method’s parameters have changed.
If the custom functionality does not change the original functionality, such as for logging or email send, use observers.
Use the extension attributes mechanism to add new fields to the database.

The Connector adds user interface (UI) changes to the Admin panel only, so you can use the same extension rules as recommended for a Connector-less Magento installation.

Backward incompatibility

During the customization of the Connector, it is important to evaluate backward incompatibility concerns.

See Backward compatible development for more information.

The Connector, however, does not utilize such strict backward compatibility rules as for Magento core modules. The policy for PHP classes, for instance, is only relevant and applicable to the classes marked with @api, or classes which implement interfaces marked as @api.