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)

Custom Views field

Now that we have seen how data is exposed to Views, we can start understanding the NodeViewsData handler I mentioned earlier (even if not quite everything) a bit better. But this also provides a good segue back to our Product entity type's views_data handler, where we can now see what the responsibility of getViewsData() is. It needs to return the definition for all of the tables and fields, as well as what they can do. Luckily for us, the base class already provides everything we need to turn our product data into Views fields, filters, sorts, arguments, and potentially relationships, all out of the box.

But let's say we want to add some more Views fields that make sense to us in the context of our product-related functionality. For example, each product has a source field that is populated by the Importer entity from its own source field. This is...