• Development

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

    / March 24, 2021

    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.

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  • Development

    Missing Titles on Drupal 8 ECK Content Listings

    / February 5, 2021

    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:

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  • Development

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

    / December 14, 2020

    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.

     

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