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 File and Image fields

In order to demonstrate how to work with managed files, we will go back to our product entity importer and bring in some images for each product. However, in order to store them, we need to create a field on the Product entity. This will be an image field.

Instead of creating this field through the UI and attaching it to a bundle, let's do it the programmatic way and make it a base field (available on all bundles). We won't need to do anything complex; for now we are only interested in a basic field that we can use to store the images we bring in from the remote API. It can look something like this:

$fields['image'] = BaseFieldDefinition::create('image') 
  ->setLabel(t('Image')) 
  ->setDescription(t('The product image.')) 
  ->setDisplayOptions('form', array( 
    'type...