Programming Drupal 7 Entities

Expose local or remote data as Drupal 7 entities and build custom solutions

Overview

• Understand and develop using the entity paradigm and entity metadata wrappers
• Create, retrieve, update, and delete (CRUD) operations on all entities
• Programmatically attach fields to entities and manipulate their data
• Expose remote data in a non-fieldable or fieldable entity with support for the import and export of bundle configurations
• Thorough coverage of common core and contributed entity types along with custom data exposure

In Detail

Writing code for manipulating Drupal data has never been easier! Learn to dice and serve your data as you slowly peel back the layers of the Drupal entity onion. Next, expose your legacy local and remote data to take full advantage of Drupal’s vast solution space.

Programming Drupal 7 Entities is a practical, hands-on guide that provides you with a thorough knowledge of Drupal’s entity paradigm and a number of clear step-by-step exercises, which will help you take advantage of the real power that is available when developing using entities.

This book looks at the Drupal 7 entity paradigm, and breaks down the mystery and confusion that developers face when building custom solutions using entities. It will take you through a number of clear, practical recipes that will help you to take full advantage of Drupal entities in your web solutions without much coding.

You will also learn how to expose local and remote data to give your legacy data new life as fully-fledged Drupal entities that can be used by other modules such as views, rules, and so on. In addition to this, you’ll learn to create, retrieve, update, and delete (CRUD) entities, their properties and fields, along with some programmatic wizardry to manipulate complex entities such as field collections. If you want to develop quickly and easily using Drupal entities, then this is the book for you.

You will learn everything you need to know to develop code and expose data using entities in Programming Drupal 7 Entities.

What you will learn from this book

• Manipulate and utilize comment, file, field collection, node, term, user, and vocabulary entities
• Attach, manipulate, and utilize date, file, image, link, number, text, and term reference fields
• Write type-agnostic code dealing with more types of Drupal data than ever before
• Upgrade a legacy Drupal node module to expose and utilize entities
• Expose your legacy database tables as fully-fledged Drupal entities
• Batch import remote data and expose them as entities
• Glean good coding practices for dealing with entities

Approach

The book follows a standard tutorial-based approach to create, retrieve, update, and delete Drupal 7 entities, their properties and fields.

Who this book is written for

Programming Drupal 7 Entities is perfect for intermediate or advanced developers new to Drupal entity development who are looking to get a good grounding in how to code using the new paradigm. It’s assumed that you will have some experience in PHP development already, and being vaguely familiar with Drupal, GIT, and Drush will also help.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Understanding Entities
Chapter 2: Developing with Entity Metadata Wrappers
Chapter 3: Developing with Non-fieldable Entities
Chapter 4: Developing with Fieldable Entities
Chapter 5: Developing with Fields
Chapter 6: Developing with Field Collections
Chapter 7: Expose Local Entities
Chapter 8: Expose Remote Entities