Drupal 7 Entities was delivered by Tomi Mikola of Mearra

1. Drupal 7 Entities
DrupalCamp Helsinki
27.9.2011
Tomi Mikola
business of open technology

2. About me
• Working at Mearra
• Architect, senior developer, project
mgr, salesman, co-founder, Drupal
evangelist
• Drupal as the primary platform since
2006
business of open technology

3. What are entities?
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4. Concept of Entity
• Generalization of something that can
be stored in Drupal
• Standardized set of how data
structures are represented
• In D6 nodes were considered as the
main abstraction point
business of open technology

5. Concept of Entity
• Type of objects which Drupal is
aware of
• Something unique, relevant to the
application
• "The new Node"
• D7: Nodes, Users, Files, Comments,
Terms, ...
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6. Fields and entities
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7. Fields
• Data types which can be attached to
any kind of entity
• Widgets & formatters
• Field instances
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8. Bundles
• Entity + field (*n) = Bundle
• Node (entity), Article (bundle)
• User (entity), User (bundle)
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9. business of open technology Entity API

10. Entity API
• Contrib module (drupal.org/project/entity)
• Completes what Drupal core entities
should be
• Full CRUD operations
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11. business of open technology Entity?

12. Entities or Nodes?
• “I created a draft using Word”
• Translations, versioning?
• End-user’s point of view: “Content!”
business of open technology

13. How to begin?
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14. How to begin with entities?
• No UI
• Write code
• hook_schema()
• hook_entity_info()
• Label
• Base table
• Fieldable
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15. How to begin with entities?
function node_entity_info() {
$return = array(
'node' => array(
'label' => t('Node'),
'controller class' => 'NodeController',
'base table' => 'node',
'revision table' => 'node_revision',
'uri callback' => 'node_uri',
'fieldable' => TRUE,
'entity keys' => array(
'id' => 'nid',
'revision' => 'vid',
'bundle' => 'type',
'label' => 'title',
),
'bundles' => array(),
//...
business of open technology

16. business of open technology Prove it!

17. Poll Improved (demo)
• Drupal core Poll doesn’t take
advantage of entities
• Started new project to test Entity API
• Model (contrib module) as basis
• Flexibility by using Field API
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18. Thank you!
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19. business of open technology
Photos © Tomi Mikola