EntityFieldQuery

Even though Drupal 7 core fell short of a proper way of handling its brand new entity system (we currently rely on the great Entity module for that), it did give us EntityFieldQuery. For those of you who don’t know, EntityFieldQuery is a very powerful querying class used to search Drupal entities programatically (nodes, users, etc).

It provides a number of methods that make it easy to query entities based on conditions such as field values or class properties. If you don’t know how it works, feel free to check out this documentation page or this great tutorial on the subject.

In this article I am going to talk about what we have in Drupal 8 for querying entities. There is no more EntityFieldQuery, but there’s an entity.query service that will instantiate a query object for a given entity type (and that implements the \Drupal\Core\Entity\Query\QueryInterface). We can access this service statically through the \Drupal namespace or using dependency injection.

First up, we’ll look at querying node entities and then we’ll see how to load them. The same techniques will work with other content entities as well (users, comments etc), but also with configuration entities, and that’s really cool.

The entity query service

As mentioned, there are two ways we can access the entity.query service that we use for querying entities. Statically, we can do this:

$query = \Drupal::entityQuery('node');

Instead of node, we can specify any other entity type machine name and what we get inside the $query variable is the query object for our entity type. The entityQuery() static method on the \Drupal namespace is a shortcut for doing so using the entity.query service.

Alternatively (and the highly recommended approach) is to use dependency injection.

If you have access to the container, you can load the service from there and then get the right query object:

$entity_query_service = $container->get('entity.query');
$query = $entity_query_service->get('node');

As you can see, we use the get() method on the entity_query service to instantiate a query object for the entity type with the machine name passed as a parameter.

Querying entities

Let’s illustrate a couple of examples of querying for node entities using this object.

A very simple query that returns the published nodes:

$query = \Drupal::entityQuery('node')
    ->condition('status', 1);
    
$nids = $query->execute();

$nids will be an array of entity ids (in our case node ids) keyed by the revision ids (if there is revisioning enabled for the entity type) or the entity ids if not. Let’s see an example in which we add more property conditions as well as field conditions:

$query = \Drupal::entityQuery('node')
    ->condition('status', 1)
    ->condition('changed', REQUEST_TIME, '<')
    ->condition('title', 'cat', 'CONTAINS')
    ->condition('field_tags.entity.name', 'cats');

$nids = $query->execute();

In this query, we retrieve the node ids of all the published nodes that have been last updated before the current time, that have the word cat inside their title and that have a taxonomy term called cats as a reference in the field_tags.

As you can see, there is no more distinction between propertyCondition and fieldCondition (as there is in D7 with EntityFieldQuery). Additionally, we can include conditions based on referenced entities tacking on the entity.(column) to the entity reference field name.

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