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)

Using the Cache API

So far in this chapter, we've mostly preoccupied ourselves with render arrays and how we can expose them to the Cache API for better performance. It's now time to talk a bit about how cache entries are stored by default in Drupal and how we can interact with them ourselves in our code.

As mentioned earlier, a central interface for the cache system is the CacheBackendInterface, which is the interface any caching system needs to implement. It basically provides the methods for creating, reading, and invalidating cache entries.

As we might expect, when we want to interact with the Cache API, we use a service to retrieve an instance of the CacheBackendInterface. However, the service name we use depends on the cache bin we want to work with. Cache bins are repositories that group together cache entries based on their type. So, the aforementioned implementation...