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)

Using our custom field type as a base field

At the beginning of this chapter, I stressed the importance of understanding the makeup of a field (type, widget, and formatter) so as to easily define base fields on custom entity types. This understanding allows you to navigate through Drupal core code, discover their settings and use them on base fields. So, let's cement this understanding by seeing how our new field could be defined as a base field on a custom entity type.

Here is an example where we actually use all the available settings we defined for each of the three plugins. Note that any settings that are left out default to the values we specified in the relevant defaults method, as follows:

$fields['plate'] = BaseFieldDefinition::create('license_plate') 
  ->setLabel(t('License plate')) 
  ->setDescription(t('Please provide your...