Better parameter handling for entity_load

Definitely not critical.

Na. -1 for inconsistent APIs (I know we have some others like that lying around). The return value is always an array, so supporting either a scalar or an array as the input argument make it even more inconsistent.

By the way, this should have type-hinting, I'm not sure why this one hasn't.

This actually already works because we have an empty($ids) check.

Adding the type hint breaks the tests, see also #839986: Enforce array arguments (Say good bye to Fatal error: Cannot use object of type stdClass as array errors), which I actually removed the type hint for entity_load() because it's technically an api change.

Edit: simply changing to needs review to confirm that this fails.

This version accepts a single id and should not cause any downstream ill effects.

I marked this as major, because the sooner the change is made, the greater the good it can do in terms of simplifying all the other code that invokes this function.

+++ b/core/modules/entity/entity.moduleundefined
@@ -232,6 +232,10 @@ function entity_load($entity_type, $ids = FALSE, $conditions = array(), $reset =
+  if(is_numeric($ids)) {

There needs to be a space between if and the parentheses. Reference: http://drupal.org/coding-standards#controlstruct

Additionally, if we're changing the allowed values of a parameter, we need to update the function documentation to indicate that.

Finally, this is not major. I'm actually not sure this change should be made at all.

This is the wrong approach anyway. entity_load() needs to be renamed to entity_load_multiple(), to be consistent with all the other load functions. Sure, this will break everything, but we're allowed to do that in this stage.

So maybe this is a duplicate of #1160566: entity_load() is actually entity_load_multiple()?

Yes, either this is won't fix for #2 or duplicate for #9. I'm going for duplicate.

Thanks for the pointer to http://drupal.org/node/1160566