Drupal 8 comes with plenty of new features: the high visibility ones, like CKEditor or Views in core, and those less obvious but equally pivotal to Drupal 8’s strength and flexibility, like the Entity Validation API.
Never heard of it? You’re not alone – much of the fanfare around Drupal 8 is devoted to the shiny parts. But under the hood, rock solid developer APIs like the Entity Validation API are what will make Drupal 8 a pleasure to work with for client projects and contributed modules alike.
So what is this Entity Validation API and why should you care?
For Those Who Came in Late
In Drupal versions up to and including Drupal 7, any validation was done in the Form API. Consider the Comment entity, provided by the Comment module. There is a lot of validation relating to comments, such as:
- If the comment is being updated, we confirm the timestamp is a valid date.
- If the comment is being updated and the username is changed, we confirm the username is valid.
- If the comment is anonymous, we validate that the name used for the comment doesn’t match an existing username.
- If the comment is anonymous, we confirm that the e-mail address entered is valid.
- If the comment is anonymous, we confirm that the homepage is a valid URL.
In Drupal 7 and earlier all of this happens in the comment form validation logic, in comment_form_validate().
The issue here is that this validation is tied to a form submission. If you’re saving a comment via some other method, then you have to duplicate all this logic to ensure you don’t end up with invalid comment entities. Common alternate methods include:
- using Rules;
- using a Restful, Services, or Rest WS endpoint;
- programmatically saving via custom code;
- using a custom comment form.
The same scenario is repeated for Nodes, Users, Taxonomy terms, and custom Blocks (which aren’t entities per se in Drupal 7, but the story is the same).
It’s Like an Onion, or Maybe a Layer Cake
But before we can talk about Drupal 8’s Entity Validation API, we need to go over some background on the Entity API itself.
In Drupal 7, entities are \StdClassobjects; accessing field values depends on the entity and the field. There is no real unification. For example, $node->title is a string, while $node->field_tags is an array.
And so, in Drupal 7 you might see things like this:
$node->field_make_it_stop['LANGUAGE_NONE'][0]['wtf_bbq'];
In Drupal 8, the Entity Field API brings unified access to field properties and first-class objects for each entity type. So in Drupal 8, you see consistency like this:
$node->field_rainbows->value; $node->title->value;
When you work with fields and entities in Drupal 8, you’re likely to interact with a suite of interfaces that comprise the API.
Key Interfaces in Drupal 8 Entity Field API
Let’s start with ContentEntityInterface, the overarching interface that content entities in Drupal 8 implement. (Node, Comment, Taxonomy Term, and BlockContent, among others, implement this interface.)
Each field and each property on a content entity is an instance of FieldItemListInterface. Even fields like the node title are lists, which just contain a single value.
Each FieldItemListInterface consists of one or more FieldItemInterface objects.
At the lowest level of the API, each FieldItemInterface is comprised of one or more DataDefinitionInterface objects that make up the properties or columns in each item value.
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