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

UserData API

Now, I want to briefly talk about another user-specific storage option, provided by the User module, called UserData.

The purpose of the UserData API is to allow the storage of certain pieces of information related to a particular user. Its concept is similar to the State API in that the type of information stored is not configuration that should be exported. In other words, it is specific to the current environment (but belonging to a given user rather than a system or subsystem).

Users are content entities who can have fields of various data types. These fields are typically used for structured information pertaining to the user, for example, a first and a last name. However, if you need to store something more irregular, such as user preferences or flag that a given user has done something, UserData is a good place to do that. This is because the information is either not something structured or is not meant for the users themselves to manage. So, let's see...