Module Development

Provide an Admin UI for Your Entity for Drupal 7

This page is archived

We're keeping this page up as a courtesy to folks who may need to refer to old instructions. We don't plan to update this page.

Alternate resources

Sprout Video

Update your hook_entity_info implementation to take advantage of the Admin UI provided by the Entity API and quickly provide users of your site access to all the Entity CRUD operations via the UI. The API gives us a really good head start but we still need to write some code in order to provide a useable form for administrators. The API doesn’t make any assumptions about things like validating input so we also need to take care of that ourselves.

This video adds a new permission that allows privileged users administer our new videoasset entities. If you're following along as a user other than user 1 you'll need to make sure you give yourself the proper permissions. In the video, I'm logged in as the user with the ID of 1 so I'm just granted the permissions automatically.

Note: If you're following along with the videos in sequence there's an error that needs correcting. At the end of the previous video code was added to videoentity_entity_info() that references a VideoEntityUIController class, however, the definition of that class was not added. Which, will cause a PHP error because the class is missing.

In order to correct this error, you'll want to add the following code to the bottom of your videoentity.module file. This just ensures that the class is defined so that there are no errors. If you're curious about what it does it's explained in the last part of the previous video.


/**
 * Our custom controller for the admin ui.
 */
class VideoEntityUIController extends EntityDefaultUIController {}

In a later tutorial in this series, we'll customize the form for our video entity by adding more code to this class.

Note: At 14:10 on line 36 this line is added:

'#value' => isset($VideoAsset->id) ? t('Update video asset') : t('Save video 
asset'),

It should be:

'#value' => isset($video->id) ? t('Update video asset') : t('Save video 
asset'),