Upgrading Database Schema for a Plugin
If you need to upgrade your database schema for a custom plugin, e.g. adding a new table or changing the properties of an existing table, you should do it through db/upgrade.php per the suggestions in the Upgrade API in Moodle Docs.
This isn’t a bad idea to do even when iterating through development as it isn’t a lot of work to keep things synchronised through the XMLDB editor and you won’t miss something later like you can if you are manually altering database schema.
Use the Moodle XMLDB editor to adjust your schema:
Copy the relevant changes into your install.xml and upgrade.php straight from the editor
then update your plugin version and test.
The Moodle XMLDB editor actually makes this very easy.
- Open the XMLDB editor
- Find your plugin (assuming it is already installed etc). If you haven’t managed to get this far, at least install what you have so it will show up in XMLDB editor. Note you do not need to have anything DB related defined for this to work.
- Load the DB for you plugin or if nothing is defined using Create.
- Follow the UI to create your table, fields, keys and indexes
- When you are ready use View PHP code to get the code to go into
db/upgrade.php
Go all the way back to the main XMLDB editor screen (where you can see all plugin databases) and use save to save the XML to db/install.xml as well.
See this article if you are getting a save error.
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