Passing entire channel entry to plugin

Question

I'm relatively new to ExpressionEngine, and apologise if this seems obtuse!

I have channel entries with a lot of fields associated with them (each channel entry will typically have 20+ channel fields), and I wanted to know if there was a way to pass all those fields to my plugin somehow by just sending through the entire entry itself as a parameter?

Currently, I'm trying to avoid something like this:

{exp:channel:entries channel="my_news" limit="10"}
    {exp:my_plugin:process_something field1="" field2="" field3="" ... field40=""}
{/exp:channel:entries}

Is there an easy and efficient way to send through all those field values to my plugin? Or alternatively, get the entry itself in the plugin and just pass the entry ID as the parameter, something like:

{exp:channel:entries channel="my_news" limit="10"}
    {exp:my_plugin:process_something entry_id="{entry_id}"}
{/exp:channel:entries}

...and then in the plugin:

public function process_something()
{
    $entry_id = ee()->TMPL->fetch_param('entry_id');
    $entry = < some function / method to get the entry and its details > ;
}

Is there something to make this possible? I hope this makes sense, and thank you for any help!

Answer 1

By default plugin tags inside modules is executed before parent module. To change the order you need to add parse="inward" parameter to exp:channel:entries tag

{exp:channel:entries channel="my_news" limit="10" parse="inward"}
    {exp:my_plugin:process_something entry_id="{entry_id}"}
{/exp:channel:entries}

Answer 2

For anyone interested, I eventually went with the following. It provides the essential functionality I was looking for. If anyone has any pointers, suggestions or alternative solutions, please don't hesitate to provide them as I'm still fairly new to EE and will consider them as applicable answers!

First off, in my template:

{exp:channel:entries channel="my_news" limit="10"}
    {exp:my_plugin:process entry_id="{entry_id}"}
{/exp:channel:entries}

Next, my plugin, located in \system\expressionengine\third_party\my_plugin\pi.my_plugin.php:

<?php

    if (!defined('BASEPATH')) exit('Page not found.');

    class My_plugin {

        public $return_data;
        public function __construct() {
            $this->return_data = '';
        }

        public function process() {

            // get the entry data...
            $entry_id = ee()->TMPL->fetch_param('entry_id');
            $sql = 'select * from ' . ee()->db->dbprefix('channel_data') .
                ' where entry_id = "'. $entry_id .'"';
            $select = ee()->db->query($sql);

            if ($select->num_rows() > 0) {
                $row = $select->row();
                // do something with the data...
            }
        }
    }