Book Image

Drupal Rules How-to

By : Robert Varkonyi
Book Image

Drupal Rules How-to

By: Robert Varkonyi

Overview of this book

Rules is what every Drupal site builder and developer has to use when creating event ñ action-based applications. The framework provides a highly flexible way to create sophisticated, condition-based functions any Drupal based system into an interactive application. Rules makes Drupal rule the CMS world."Drupal Rules How-to" is a practical, hands-on guide that provides you with a number of clear step-by-step exercises, which will help you take advantage of the real power of the Rules framework, and understand how to use it on a site builder and developer levelThis book demonstrates the power and flexibility of the Rules framework. It discusses the main aspects of the module both from the site builder and developer perspective, from basic and advanced Rule configurations using Events, Conditions, Actions and Components to getting familiar with the Rules API. You will also learn how to use additional modules together with Rules to further extend the possibilities of your Drupal system, such as Rules Scheduler to schedule the execution of your Rule configurations and Views Bulk Operations to execute Rule configurations on a view result list. The book also demonstrates the main API features that enable you to create your own Events, Conditions and Actions, provide new data types to Rules and execute your configurations programmatically
Table of Contents (7 chapters)

Debugging Rules (Must know)


This recipe explains how to debug the rule configurations using the user interface.

How to do it...

  1. Go to Configuration | Workflow | Rules | Settings.

  2. Set Show debug information to Always.

  3. Save the form.

How it works

Rules provides a very useful debugging system. This allows us to follow all the steps of a rule configuration as it's being executed. The following screenshot will show you if the Conditions evaluate and how long each step takes:

This is useful when our rule configuration doesn't work the way we want it to. It's always advised to use the debugger to see if the Conditions we used to evaluate the way we want them to. It's also useful that we're able to see how long each step takes. In this case, 16 ms is not a huge overhead when creating a node. However, if our rule configuration is set to fire Actions on each page load, it might lead to problems and it's advised to refactor that particular configuration.

There's more...

Despite there being user permissions related to the display of debugging information, it's advised that on production sites we don't display debug information on the UI. Instead, we make Rules write the logs into the log file by setting the value Log debug information to the system log on the Settings page, as shown in the following screenshot:

The following recipes describe some more advanced features of the Rules framework, including the usage of PHP in Conditions and Actions and explains how to use Rules together with other modules, such as Flag, Views Bulk Operations, and Rules Bonus Pack.