Book Image

Drupal 7 First Look

Book Image

Drupal 7 First Look

Overview of this book

Drupal 7 contains features for which site administrators have been clamoring for years, including support for fields, an improved administration interface, better database support, improved theming, and more. You could of course make a laborious search on sites, blogs, and many online tutorials that would promise to update you about every new feature, but there's an even better way to know all about Drupal 7's new features: Drupal 7 First Look is the first and only book that covers all of the fantastic new features in Drupal 7 in depth and covers the process of upgrading your Drupal 6 site to Drupal 7. If you've used Drupal 6 and want to use Drupal 7, you need this book.Drupal 7 First Look takes an in-depth look into all of the major new features in Drupal 7 so you can quickly take full advantage of Drupal 7. It also assists you in upgrading your site to Drupal 7. Some of the new features in Drupal 7 include: Fields API, based on Drupal 6 CCK, which allows you to easily build your own content types Improved user interface for administering your website Built-in support for working with images and files Improved security for the site and users of the site Completely rewritten database layer DBTNG to make working with the database easier and more secure. Improved API for custom module development and user interface theming
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
Drupal 7 First Look
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
Preface
Index

Using select statements


As discussed earlier, select statements allow you to retrieve information from the database. There are several methods of doing this in Drupal 7 depending on whether you want to use a procedural or object-oriented syntax and whether or not the SQL statement to be executed is provided by the developer or if the SQL statement is built by Drupal. Let's start by looking at queries where the statement is provided to Drupal.

Static queries

Static queries use SQL statements that are provided to the DBTNG layer rather than being built by Drupal. For example, to get a list of all nodes in the system, you can call:

<?php
  $result = db_query("SELECT nid, title FROM {node}");
?>

This statement simply returns the node ID and title of all nodes within the system.

You may have noticed that the name of the table, in this case node, is surrounded by curly braces. Similar to Drupal 6, you can surround a table with curly braces which causes Drupal to automatically prefix the table...