Book Image

Drupal 10 Module Development - Fourth Edition

By : Daniel Sipos
Book Image

Drupal 10 Module Development - Fourth Edition

By: Daniel Sipos

Overview of this book

Embark on a journey of Drupal module development with the latest edition of this must-have guide written by Daniel Sipos – a Drupal community member! This fourth edition is meticulously revised to cover the latest Drupal 10 enhancements that will help you build custom Drupal modules with an understanding of code deprecations, changing architecture, data modeling, multilingual ecosystem, and so on. You’ll begin with understanding the core components of Drupal 10 architecture, discovering its subsystems and unlocking the secrets of creating your first Drupal module. Further, you'll delve into Drupal logging and mailing systems, creating theme hooks, and rendering a layout. As you progress, you'll work with different types of data storage, custom entities, field types, and work with Database APIs for lower-level database queries. You'll learn to reap the power of JavaScript and ensure that your code works seamlessly on multilingual sites. You'll also learn to create custom views, automate tests for your functionalities, and write secure code for your Drupal apps. By the end of this book, you'll have gained confidence in developing complex modules that can solve even the most complex business problems and might even become a valuable contributor to the Drupal community!
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
3
Chapter 3: Logging and Mailing

Render arrays

Render arrays are a core part of the Render API that is responsible for transforming markup representations into actual markup.

Acknowledging my limits as a writer, I will defer to the definition found in the Drupal.org documentation, which best describes what render arrays are:

... a hierarchical associative array containing data to be rendered and properties describing how the data should be rendered.

Simple, but powerful.

One of the principal reasons behind having render arrays is that they allow Drupal to delay the actual rendering of something into markup to the very last moment. This means we simply construct render arrays and by the end of the request, Drupal will know how to turn them into markup. This way, modules and themes can intercept them at various levels in the process and make alterations.

We will now talk about render arrays and the different aspects of working with them.

The structure of a render array

Render arrays are rendered...