Moodle service hooks and integrating with another system - moodle

Question

Does Moodle support service hooks (or some kind of trigger) so that another system can be updated when events are triggered by users.
The company we'd like to use Moodle for already have a large db storing all their learning and course management, but would now like to take a lot of their courses to an e-learning implementation. They however cannot move away from their current system as not all courses and learning will be e-learning, so my intention is to keep the current system as the primary store for all these details, but use Moodle to provide the e-learning side of things, feeding information back to the primary store.
If a user on my Moodle site completes a task, or signs up for a course etc, is there a way to "broadcast" this event to the other system running on another environment, providing all the details of the event? I'm hoping to create a REST API in the current system that will handle http requests from my Moodle site.
Many thanks for any feedback

Answer 1

You can use the events api - https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Events_API
Create a local plugin eg:
/local/external_update
Create an events.php
/local/external_update/db/events.php
Which has something like this - eg: the user_enrolled event
$handlers = array (
'user_enrolled' => array (
'handlerfile' => '/local/external_update/lib.php',
'handlerfunction' => 'local_external_update_user_enrolled',
'schedule' => 'instant',
'internal' => 1,
),
);
Then in /local/external_update/lib.php have
function local_external_update_user_enrolled($eventdata) {
// Do some rest stuff.
}
Then create a version.php and install the plugin then the event handler will be registered.
There are a few events already but if you can't find an existing one then its easy to create an event - just add it to the core code if necessary.
events_trigger('event_name', $eventdata);