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

TypedData

In order to really understand how entity data is modeled, we need to understand the TypedData API. Unfortunately, this API still remains quite a mystery for many. But you're in luck because, in this section, we're going to get to the bottom of it.

Why TypedData?

It helps to understand things better if we first talk about why there was the need for this API. It all has to do with the way PHP as a language is, compared to others, and that is, loosely typed. This means that in PHP it is very difficult to use native language constructs to rely on the type of certain data or understand more about that data.

The difference between the string "1" and integer 1 is a very common example. We are often afraid of using the === sign to compare them because we never know what they actually come back as from the database or wherever. So, we either use == (which is not really good) or forcefully cast them to the same type and hope PHP will be able to get it right...