Get SiteConfig variables inside _config.php

Question

In SilverStripe 3.4.1 I want to control _config.php file values through the Admin settings. I want to set some variables in Admin > Settings > MyTab and then access these variables in _config.php.

Is there a way to access SiteConfig variables in the _config.php file?

I tried to use several different ways to get the config data:

• Config::inst()
  • print_r/var_dump gives all the values as an array
• Config::inst()->get($this->class, 'PropertyName') or $this->config()-> get('PropertyName')
  • Returns empty
• SiteConfig::current_site_config() or any other similar variations based on the previous two
  • Internal Server Error

The reason I want to do this is I have a plugin that replaces some SilverStripe default action but it requires some data to be inserted. If this data is not inserted it should stay as default.

Here are some resources I have read through to try to find a solution:

• http://api.silverstripe.org/3.3/class-Config.html
• https://docs.silverstripe.org/en/3.0/topics/configuration/
• https://docs.silverstripe.org/en/3.4/developer_guides/configuration/configuration/
• https://docs.silverstripe.org/en/3.4/developer_guides/configuration/siteconfig/

Answer 1

The issue is DB::connect is not called at that stage in _config.php. Therefore we cannot retrieve items from the database.

What we can do is call DB::connect in our _config.php before we retrieve our SiteConfig.

Assuming our database config settings are stored in $databaseConfig, here is the code to fetch our SiteConfig:

DB::connect($databaseConfig);
$siteConfig = SiteConfig::current_site_config();

Then we can retrieve SiteConfig variables like so:

$siteConfig->Title;