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

Interacting with the Entity API

In this final section of the chapter, we're going to cover the most common things you will be doing with content and configuration entities. These are the main topics we will discuss going forward:

  • Querying and loading entities
  • Reading entities
  • Manipulating entities (update/save)
  • Creating entities
  • Rendering entities
  • Validating entity data

So, let's hit it.

Querying entities

One of the most common things you will do as a programmer is querying stuff, such as data in the database. The entity API offers a layer that reduces the need to query the database directly. In a later chapter, we will see how we can still do that when things become more complex. For now, since most of our structured data belongs in entities, we will use the entity query system for retrieving entities.

If you remember when we spoke about the entity type handlers, one of them was the storage handler that provides the API for CRUD...