For which plugin group?

Should not the table being sent in the before and after events? Otherwise we can get in the situation that every listener has to do a db lookup when the table is required. It would be then also more inline with the rest of the content events.

@ReLater The events are for content plugins

@laoneo the pseudocode of a batch command (batchAccess for example) could be something like this

batch()
{
  onContentBeforeBatch($identifier, $value, $pks, $contexts)
  batchAccess($value, $pks, $contexts) {
    foreach($pks as $pk)
    {
      $this->table->load($pk)
      $this->table->access = $value
      onContentBeforeSave($context, &$this->table, false, array('access' => (int) $value))
      $table->store()
      onContentAfterSave($context, $this->table, false, array('access' => (int) $value))
    }
  }
  onContentAfterBatch($identifier, $value, $pks, $contexts)
}

You can trigger the onContentBeforeSave/onContentAfterSave events inside the specific batch command or onContentBeforeBatch/onContentAfterBatch outside that.
This PR is designed to trigger onContentBeforeBatch/onContentAfterBatch outside the specific batch function. PR #20133 is designed to trigger onContentBeforeSave/onContentAfterSave inside batchAccess function. We can benchmark performances of both of the PRs and choose which is the best solution.

Should not the table being sent in the before and after events?

yes that would be ideal,
but how could we do this since JTable does not support loading / handling multiple records ?
so this PR is passing the PKs array

it would need extending JTable and add to loading and saving of multiple records with single queries
that would be not be too difficult work, but not trivial either

Otherwise we can get in the situation that every listener has to do a db lookup when the table is required.

hhmm if the listener knows that all or some records will be needed they will just do 1 query to get them all, that if the listener would care to do something that is performance wise,
but of course then you will have every listener doing this ... N listeners needing the table records, N queries

But since every batch Method is already loading M JTable records 1 by 1, with M queries

why not load them inside a loop before the batch loop , in an array indexed by $pk ?
and then inside the batch loop do:
$this->table = $tables[$pk];

it will consume a little more memory

but offer these benefits

• listeners will have the JTable records
• in future we can add JTableArray or do similar work, that will support loading multiple records at once and it will provide an array of JTable record, and things will continue to work without B/C break

just you will need to move the call of
onContentBeforeBatch
onContentAfterBatch

that you have added in this PR, inside every batch method just after all records have loaded,
which anyway is probably more proper / flexible

Is not $this->table the actual record you do the batch command for (I didn't had look on the batch code)?

Yes, it is. The pseudocode shows the idea not the real php code.

I don't understand why I can manipulate $pks and $contexts in onContentBeforeBatch
but not $value.

Is there a reason why this is not allowed?

e.g.

if ($identifier === 'assetgroup_id' && somethingElse)
{
 $value = someOtherValue;
}

@eshiol can you please give test instructions in opening comment?

Sorry for the late response here. I really like that feature as we definitely need some events when doing batch processing. Can you rebase on the branch 4.2-dev and use the new event classes of Joomla 4? In the meantime I'm closing this pr, when ready, please reopen again so we can get it into a mergeable state. Thanks for your help making Joomla better.