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

Update hooks

At the beginning of this chapter, we defined two tables using hook_schema() which got installed together with the module. To reiterate, if the module had already been installed, we could have triggered the schema installation using the drupal_install_schema() function. However, what if we needed to add another column later on, say to the teams table? Our module is installed, and so is the schema; we cannot exactly uninstall it on production just to trigger the schema creation again, not to mention losing the data. Luckily, there is a system in place for this, namely update hooks—hook_update_N()—where N represents the schema version. These are sequentially named hook implementations that go inside the module *.install file and that are triggered when running the updates, either by going to /update.php or by using the drush updated command.

The main purpose of these update hooks is making schema alterations to existing database tables.

Note

If you...