• Development

    Writing Tests for Drush Commands

    There are plenty of examples of these in the wild, but I figured I’d show a stripped down version of an automated Kernel test that successfully tests a drush command. The trick here is making sure you set up a logger and that you stub a few methods (if you happen to use $this->logger()  and dt()  in your Drush commands). Also featured in this example is the use of Faker to generate realistic test data.

    I learned this via the migrate_tools project here.

  • Development

    Skip Empty Values During Concatenation in a Drupal 10 Migration

    UPDATE. You can do the same as below without the need for a custom module function. (source)


    This quick example shows one method to ignore empty values in a Drupal 10 migration concatenate process.

    Code

    Migrate code:

    Module code:

    Result

    Example data:

    Resulting field_address_full plain text value

     

  • Development

    Drupal Migrate API skip_on_multiple Process Plugin

    Here’s a Migrate API process plugin I wrote in Drupal 9 that skips a property or row when more than one value exists. My use case:

    1. My source data has locations; each location has multiple associated organizations
    2. My new Drupal site has locations; each location has a parent organization
    3. I want to only populate the field_parent_org field (an entity reference) if there is a single organization value in the source data for the location
    4. I’m using a custom module called “pdms_migrate”

    I’ve stripped out all of the noise from the examples below… hopefully it’s enough to help you understand the example:

  • Development

    Setting a LIMIT on an UPDATE query in Drupal 8 / 9

    Here’s a quick tip regarding Drupal database manipulation. Specifically, I needed a way to flip a boolean value (from 1 to 0) on the first N rows in a database table that matched a specific set of conditions.

    The Problem

    It seems you cannot enforce a LIMIT on an UPDATE query using a static query in Drupal.

    Here’s what I was trying to do:

    This throws an error. I believe the issue is caused by the variable substitution wrapping the limit value in quotes. The error message starts with:

    If you run this query manually in MySQL, it works fine with LIMIT 10 but doesn’t work with LIMIT '10' (it throws the same error shown above).

    The Solution

    Given dynamic queries are favored over static queries, and that this static query doesn’t work, I ended up getting to the finish line with two dynamic queries.

    I have tested the solution on 10,000 records and it took < 6 seconds to process the entire request on my local dev lando site.

    “code” is a unique identifier column in the database table.

  • Development

    Missing Titles on Drupal 8 ECK Content Listings

    UPDATE: I discovered the solution below was only working when the Title base field was enabled for the entity type. If you enable the title field on the entity type it works, but then the title is required to save a new record. I will look for an alternative solution to avoid using the Title field altogether. Also, I’ll look into https://www.drupal.org/project/eck/issues/2785297.


    I’ve recently run into an issue with an ECK-created custom entity type. There was no reason for me to use the “Title” field on this particular entity type. Unfortunately, when you don’t have a title field several of the built-in entity listings and displays seem broken. Here’s what the Content List screen looks like, for example:

  • Development

    Adding Custom Fields to the Field Edit Screen in Drupal 8 / 9

    Introduction

    I’m building an API with Drupal 8/9. There is additional information I want to track against each field instance in each content type (or custom entity type) in the system. This information includes where the field’s data comes from, who is responsible for maintaining it, etc. This is useful for the site administrator and developers to track where things are coming from. Drupal’s Third Party Settings functionality makes this easy.

    Result

    This is what you see when you edit the First name field:

    When you click Save settings the data is saved to this specific field’s instance configuration (meaning if you reuse this field you can fill the info out differently per instance).

    Solution

    There are two ways to achieve this. In both cases, we use hook_form_FORM_ID_alter() to introduce the new fields. I am doing this within a custom module called pdms. The code lives in pdms.module.

    Method #1:

    With this method, the system automatically handles storing the value into the field configuration’s third party settings.

    This happens because we use the  third_party_settings  key.

    The issue I had with this approach is that I could not get it to work if I put the fields in a fieldset (as shown in the screenshot).

    I think it’d be a matter of getting $entity->getThirdPartySetting()  to look into the fieldset somehow. If you know how to do this, please let me know!

    Method #2:

    This method gives us more control over what happens when the form is submitted.

    Because we have more control we’re able to traverse the fieldset easily.

    You can see, too, how I unset the third party setting if the value is empty. I am not sure if I’ll keep this in place; we’ll see if it causes any issues when I attempt to build a report showing all of the fields and their info.

     

  • Development

    Increasing Memory for Specific Paths in Drupal 8

    Most of the examples I see for Drupal 8 are for single-path memory limit increases.

    The examples for Drupal 7 often follow the pattern below.

    Here’s a D8 version that supports multiple paths.

    Place this in your settings.php (or site/environment-specific settings.php), then update the paths accordingly.

  • Development

    Conditionally Triggering Salesforce Push Operations in Drupal 8

    The user interface for the Salesforce Suite in Drupal 8 is fantastic. The suite itself is incredibly powerful. Among the many options, for each mapping you create you can specify what operations should trigger a synchronization. Here’s an example:

    We recently faced an issue with the “Drupal entity update” trigger being called too often. The salesforce_push module implements hook_entity_update() , which gets called a lot. After looking at how the functions are called in salesforce_push.module I realized there were two choices:

  • Development

    Patch for Drupal 8.7.14 SA-CORE-2020-004, SA-CORE-2020-005, and SA-CORE-2020-006

    I have a site that’s temporarily stuck on 8.7.14; it’s not worth the risk to update to 8.8.8 right now.

    I was able to diff 8.8.7 and 8.8.8 to figure out what changes were made for these security announcements:

    I could then compare the changes with 8.7.14 to create the patch below, which applies against 8.7.14 without any issues.

    DISCLAIMER: The formal recommendation is to update to 8.8.8 if at all possible. Use the patch below at your own risk.

     

  • Development

    Storing First and Last Name with Social API for Drupal 8

    I recently worked on a project that relied on Social API for Google, Facebook, and Yahoo authentication. Out of the box everything worked great. Our site stores the user’s first name and last name in two fields on the user entity: field_first_name  and field_last_name. There are a few ways to tap into the Social API authentication process (which comes from the Social Auth component).

    Originally we leveraged the SocialAuthEvents::USER_CREATED event in an event subscriber. We set the first name and last name, then re-saved the user. This, however, executes after the user is created. The issue we had was that we also have Salesforce integration and both name fields are required in Salesforce. When the user is first saved it was pushing to Salesforce without the name fields, which triggered an error.

    The solution was to implement a different event handler: SocialAuthEvents::USER_FIELDS

    This lets you manipulate the user fields before the user is saved. I poked through the Social Auth code and figured out how to get the first and last name values. Here’s the working solution:

    web/modules/custom/mymodule/mymodule.services.yml

    web/modules/custom/mymodule/src/EventSubscriber/MymoduleSocialAuthSubscriber.php

    After creating/updating the files above, just clear the caches and test.