Book Image

Drupal 9 Module Development - Third Edition

By : Daniel Sipos
Book Image

Drupal 9 Module Development - Third Edition

By: Daniel Sipos

Overview of this book

With its latest release, Drupal 9, the popular open source CMS platform has been updated with new functionalities for building complex Drupal apps with ease. This third edition of the Drupal Module Development guide covers these new Drupal features, helping you to stay on top of code deprecations and the changing architecture with every release. The book starts by introducing you to the Drupal 9 architecture and its subsystems before showing you how to create your first module with basic functionality. You’ll explore the Drupal logging and mailing systems, learn how to output data using the theme layer, and work with menus and links programmatically. Once you’ve understood the different kinds of data storage, this Drupal guide will demonstrate how to create custom entities and field types and leverage the Database API for lower-level database queries. You’ll also learn how to introduce JavaScript into your module, work with various file systems, and ensure that your code works on multilingual sites. Finally, you’ll work with Views, create automated tests for your functionality, and write secure code. By the end of the book, you’ll have learned how to develop custom modules that can provide solutions to complex business problems, and who knows, maybe you’ll even contribute to the Drupal community!
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
3
Chapter 3: Logging and Mailing

The Lock API

Whenever we process data on a regular basis, especially if it takes a while to complete, we might run into a situation in which parallel requests want to trigger that process again, while the first is still running. Most of the time, this is not a good thing as it can lead to conflicts and/or data corruption. A good example from Drupal core in which this can happen is the cron. If we start it, the process can end up taking a good few seconds. Remember, it needs to pull together the hook_cron() implementations and run them all. So while that is happening, if we trigger another cron run, it will give us a nice message asking us to chill because the cron is already running. It does this with the help of the Lock API.

The Lock API is a low-level Drupal solution for ensuring that processes don't trample each other. Since in this chapter we are talking about things such as batch operations, queues, and other kinds of potentially time-consuming processes, let's look...