Book Image

Drupal 8 Module Development - Second Edition

By : Daniel Sipos
Book Image

Drupal 8 Module Development - Second Edition

By: Daniel Sipos

Overview of this book

Drupal 8 comes with a release cycle that allows for new functionality to be added at a much faster pace. However, this also means code deprecations and changing architecture that you need to stay on top of. This book updates the first edition and includes the new functionality introduced in versions up to, and including 8.7. The book will first introduce you to the Drupal 8 architecture and its subsystems before diving into creating your first module with basic functionality. You will work with the Drupal logging and mailing systems, learn how to output data using the theme layer and work with menus and links programmatically. Then, you will learn how to work with different kinds of data storages, create custom entities, field types and leverage the Database API for lower level database queries. You will further see how to introduce JavaScript into your module, work with the various file systems and ensure the code you write works on multilingual sites. Finally, you will learn how to programmatically work with Views, write automated tests for your functionality and also write secure code in general. By the end, you will have learned how to develop your own custom module that can provide complex business solutions. And who knows, maybe you’ll even contribute it back to the Drupal community. Foreword by Dries Buytaert, founder of Drupal.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)

Field settings

When we created our field type, we specified some storage settings and we saw that these are typically linked to underlying storage and cannot be changed once the field has data in it. This is because databases have a hard time making table column changes when there is data present in them. However, apart from storage settings, we also have something called field settings, which are specific to the field instance on a certain entity bundle. Even more, they can (or should) be changeable even after the field has been created and has data in it. An example of such a field setting, which is available from Drupal core on all field types, is the "required" option which marks a field as required or not. So let's see how we can add our own field settings to configure what we said we want to do.

Back in our LicensePlateItem plugin class, we start by adding...