How to disable Magento event

There are some cases where you will wish to disable Magento event. For example, in one our projects we decided to disable all “Mage_Log” events in order to decrease number of sql queries to the database. We will describe the process of doing it in this post, but I’m sure similar approach can be used in many other scenarios.

How are Magento events defined? For example, go to the config.xml file of magento module “Mage_Log” and you will see next content in tag “events”.
“Events” tag contains children events, you can see chunk of config.xml file.

<frontend>
	<events>
            <controller_action_predispatch>
                <observers>
                    <log>
                        <class>log/visitor</class>
                        <method>initByRequest</method>
                    </log>
                </observers>
            </controller_action_predispatch>
            .... other events
        </events>
</frontend>

For example, if you want to disable event “controller_action_predispatch” you need to create your own module and put it in your config.xml file next xml content:

	<frontend>
		<events>
			<controller_action_predispatch>
				<observers><log><type>disabled</type></log></observers>
			</controller_action_predispatch>
		</events>
	</frontend>

You will notice that we added tag “type” with value “disable“, explanation is below.
Go to Magento class “Mage_Core_Model_App” and in method “dispatchEvent” you will see next code:

            foreach ($events[$eventName]['observers'] as $obsName=>$obs) {
                $observer->setData(array('event'=>$event));
                Varien_Profiler::start('OBSERVER: '.$obsName);
                switch ($obs['type']) {
                    case 'disabled': // if we set disabled type, event will not be executed.
                        break;
                    case 'object': case 'model':
                        $method = $obs['method'];
                        $observer->addData($args);
                        $object = Mage::getModel($obs['model']);
                        $this->_callObserverMethod($object, $method, $observer);
                        break;
                    default:
                        $method = $obs['method'];
                        $observer->addData($args);
                        $object = Mage::getSingleton($obs['model']);
                        $this->_callObserverMethod($object, $method, $observer);
                        break;
                }
                Varien_Profiler::stop('OBSERVER: '.$obsName);
            }

If you set event type to “disabled“, event will not be executed.

that’s it 🙂