

SitePoint PHP Blog:
Understanding Drupal's EntityFieldQuery
Mar 19, 2014 @ 10:02:16

On the SitePoint PHP blog there's a recent post that aims to help you understand the EntityFieldQuery class in the Drupal framework. The class lets you find entities based on properties, field values and other generic metadata.

When building complex web apps, you’ll eventually have to interact with a database. To retrieve data in Drupal one can use the database abstraction layer provided, which requires some SQL knowledge to be used properly. From Drupal 7 EntityFieldQuery API is provided, which lets you fetch information about entities from Drupal without actually building SQL queries. In this article, let’s see how we can use the EntityFieldQuery API to fetch data from Drupal and use it in our modules.

He starts by explaining a bit about the class and includes a bit of code showing how to create an instance of it. He then moves into the creation of a sample module that only locates an entity and relays the results back to the calling script. As a part of the example, he shows how to make the query to locate all "node" entity types and create a sidebar with links to each. He shows the addition of conditionals to the location call for properties, values and fields (as well as ordering the results).

tagged: drupal entityfieldquery introduction tutorial

Link: http://www.sitepoint.com/understanding-drupals-entityfieldquery/