Support for Drupal 7 is ending on 5 January 2025—it’s time to migrate to Drupal 10! Learn about the many benefits of Drupal 10 and find migration tools in our resource center.An Introduction to Entities
If you are looking for the documentation or the entity API in Drupal 8, click here.
Entity API Tutorial
This is the developer documentation for the Entity API module. Also check the README.
Entity Token Support
Drupal 7
Providing a new entity type
The Entity CRUD API allows you to easily create a new entity type. You'll get full Create, Read, Update, Delete and Index (CRUDI) functions,
Make an entity type exportable
If your entity could be considered a site configuration, it is usually a good idea to make it exportable.
Making an entity revisionable
Requires entity version 7.x-1.0 or greater
Enabling Revisions on a Table With Existing Data
Overview
Viewing entities
The entity API assists in writing the code for viewing an entity by providing entity_build_content() and entity_view() functions which take
Module integration helpers
The entity API provides some useful defaults for integrating with Rules and for providing Entity property information. If your entity type
i18n module integration
There is a i18n controller for integration (exportable) entities with the i18n module. However, the controller requires some additional code
Making use of the admin UI
Optionally, the entity API helps provide an administrative interface for managing entities, e.g. the UI for managing profile types of the
Documentation template for provided hooks
The Entity API implements hooks for any entity types implemented with the provided controller. To make developers aware of this hooks, it's
Basic file skeleton + CRUD hooks
Values to replace:
View-related hooks.
If your module makes use of entity_view(), add the following view-related hooks:
Additional hooks for exportable entities
Values to replace:
Misc hooks
If your module implements an entity form with the help of entity_ui_get_form(), the following template helps you documenting the according
Providing metadata for additional entity types
In case your module is providing an additional entity type, but is not making use of the Entity CRUD API (as described previously) some
Views integration
Entity API tries to generate suitable Views integration for the entity based upon:
Entity property information
For a general introduction of metadata about entity properties and its purpose, check this blog post.
Data types
These are the data types to be used for describing entity properties:
Entity metadata wrappers
Table of contents
Property info for fields
Fields are added in automatically by the Entity API module, as long as the field type is supported. However, the module providing the field
Displaying properties when viewing entities
When an entity is viewed, the EntityAPIController calls the buildContent() method to assemble the entity information, entity's field data
