What do you do when a plugin doesn't work?

Think you can always use a Magento plugin to modify a public function?

Think again.

Even though functions with a public visibility can be easily plugged into, there are situations where they just won’t do what you want them to do.

In the Magento Message Queues with RabbitMQ course, we’re building a custom module that runs a sentiment analysis on product reviews to help determine if the review has a positive, negative, or neutral sentiment.

To do this, we need to run some code whenever a product review is saved. You’d usually lean on using something like an after() plugin to do this, but since we are passing the review text to a third-party API and sending it to a message queue to be ran at a later time, we need access to the review ID... but don't have it because the original method returns a response redirect object 🤬

But this just means that we need to go deeper. Magento is deeply extensible and has tons of built-in functionality, and there is usually a solution in place to handle what you need to do.

If you dig a big deeper, you’ll find a save_commit_after event that is emitted any time a database transaction occurs. This means that we can hook into the core “review” table by listening for the review_save_commit_after event. And this also means we have access to any data within that database row, including the review ID.

I cover this and 30 other more lessons in the full M2 + RabbitMQ course! I’ve been publishing new lessons all this week, and the course will be complete by the end of the month.

If you want early access, consider enrolling in the University. You’ll get access to over 500 video lessons that will help you understand not only how Magento 2 works, but how to be efficient and get things done the right way. You'll also get access to a thriving private Magento community to help get answers to all your other Magento questions.

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There will probably only be one more email sent out before the course is officially available, so be on the lookout for that!