Ron Northcutt

Sr. Solutions Architect

Acquia

Video at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElAYGMuCVJw

Who am i?

• using Drupal since 4.7
• freelance developer
• small dev shop
• sr. developer & tech lead
• sr. solutions architect

Find me online:

https://www.drupal.org/u/rlnorthcutt

https://www.linkedin.com/in/rlnorthcutt

https://twitter.com/rlnorthcutt

https://plus.google.com/+RonNorthcutt

Agenda

• Overview
• Entity storage
• External entity module
• Custom storage handler
• Next steps
• QA

Warning: Going off the map.

Buckle up...

Overview

• Using Entity API
• Changing the storage handler
• That's basically it*

*The devil's in the details

Note: there are alot of details...

Entity Storage

Drupal 7

• Field API introduced the concept of swappable field storage

• Field data can live anywhere 

  • Remote DB
  • More performant DB
  • Eg. NoSQL for some things
• Problem with querying
  • Fields might be in different backends
  • Tough or impossible in some cases

Drupal 8

• Changed from field-based storage to entity-based storage

• Field data on an entity share the same backend

• Querying becomes more practical
• This is why we lost field sharing between entities
  • Eg. address on user vs. address on node

Drupal 8

• Each entity type has a dedicated storage handler

• Responsible for loading, storing, and deleting field data 

• Defined on the entity type definition 

• Can also be changed with hook_entity_type_alter() 

This is the key!

External Entity module

• https://www.drupal.org/project/external_entities
• More of a test/dev/example
• Provides a entity type and allows you to define bundles
• Each bundle = external config options
• Map fields to the external data

Demo

Custom storage handler

Diving into code

Demo

Next steps

• Query API options
• Better form integration
• Better support in core?
• More people using this approach

Tips

• Look at the Storage handles in code
• Consider Key/Value instead of content entity
• PHPStorm + Xdebug FTW
• Take your time - this is some wacky stuff