Style plugins are responsible for determining how to output a set of rows. Individual rows are rendered by row plugins. Drupal core provides style plugins that include grid, HTML list, table, and unordered list styles. If you need to render the results in a different way, for example as tabs or accordions, or have special markup based on your project requirements, you may want to write a custom style plugin for Views. The advantage of this approach versus overriding the templates in a theme is that you may reuse this plugin in different views throughout the site, or even on different sites.

In this tutorial we'll:

• Learn how to create a custom Views style plugin and render output in the form of an accordion using the HTML5 <details> element.
• Demonstrate how to use a custom style plugin when building a view.

By the end of this tutorial you should know how to declare custom Views style plugins.

Identifing the fields in your data model that contain presentation data is an important part of documenting and planning your API. Examining your existing data model will help put you in the correct mindset when creating or changing it. It is important to reflect on the implications of each field for each hypothetical consumer (even consumers your API is not serving). This process will improve your content model and your API.

In this tutorial we will:

• Go through the article content type's data model
• Locate any fields that contain presentation data

The article model is created out of the box by Drupal when using the standard installation profile.

By the end of this tutorial you'll know how to do these checks, and identify presentation data in your content model, on any content type in your project.

In a monolithic architecture (non-decoupled) there is an implicit proof that the user in the front-end is the same one in the back-end. This empowers the front-end to offload all the authentication and authorization to the back-end, typically using a session cookie. In a decoupled architecture there will be multiple consumers, and some of them will not support using cookies. There are several alternatives to session cookies to authenticate our requests in a decoupled project.

In this tutorial we will:

• Learn about authorization versus authentication
• The impact on a decoupled project of having logged in users
• Learn about the available options for authentication when using a Drupal back-end.

By the end of this tutorial you should be able to explain the difference between authentication and authorization and know how to get started implementing both in a Drupal-backed web services API.

It is important to have good up-to-date documentation about your web services. Doing so will boost developer productivity in a decoupled project. Drupal offers several tools that help maintain your API documentation with minimal effort.

In this tutorial we'll:

• Learn about the JSON schema format for describing data structures
• Generate schemas for our fake articles REST resource
• Visualize those schemas in a human-readable format

By the end of this tutorial you should be able to generate documentation for your REST resources that is kept up-to-date automatically by Drupal.

Traditional Drupal development using the render pipeline allows you to ignore the pitfalls of mixing content and presentation logic in your data model. In a scenario with multiple distribution channels, this separation becomes of critical importance.

In this tutorial we will learn how to:

• Understand the importance of presentation and content separation (delivering clean content, not caring about how to show that content)
• Develop strategies to avoid these presentational problems with minimal damage to the content API

By the end of this tutorial you'll have a better understanding of why keeping presentation data out of your content model is important, and some tips for doing so.

JavaScript applications are the most common type of consumers. They are commonly used to create a website that runs in a web browser. Running decoupled applications in the browser will involve Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS), which requires some setup on the Drupal side in order to work.

In this tutorial we'll:

• Learn about what CORS is and when/why we need to care about it
• Configure Drupal to return an appropriate CORS header, enabling browser-based consumers access to our API

By the end of this tutorial you will have a better understanding of CORS, and how to configure Drupal to serve an API that works with CORS.

In addition to using one of the existing generators, developers can write their own Drush generator commands. This can help speed up repetitive tasks and reduce the use of boilerplate code that is prone to human error.

Generators are provided through Drush's integration with the Drupal Code Generator project. Writing new generators isn't specific to Drush, though if you're creating generators for Drupal it is definitely easiest with Drush as a wrapper.

Similar to Drush commands, generators can be supplied by a Drupal module or declared globally. If you have a feature-specific functionality, it's best to ship your custom generator within the custom module. Otherwise, a global generator can be declared and used.

In this tutorial we'll:

• Explain the anatomy of a Drush generator
• Write a custom Drush generator for handling a site's development.services.yml file, and use it in a project

By the end of this tutorial you should understand how to create, or customize, a Drush code generator and use it in your project.

Code generators are great productivity boosters that allow generating scaffolds for common development tasks in Drupal. One of the most common use cases for generators is scaffolding the code required for a custom entity type. Custom entities require many files and complicated annotations in order to function properly. There is a lot of boilerplate code that is more-or-less the same for every entity type. Creating all the files is repetitive, time-consuming, and prone to human error. Generators can help automate this task and make creating your own custom entity types quicker.

In this tutorial we'll:

• Learn how to generate the code for a custom entity with Drush
• Learn about the options that generators provide for custom entities

By the end of this tutorial you should know how to generate custom entities with Drush.

The Drupal Entity API makes it easy to define new custom content entity types. And in most cases whenever you want to store custom content in Drupal you should use the Entity API instead of making CRUD queries directly to the database. This ensures your code is more consistent, and allows you to take advantage of all the features of the Entity API like access control, Views module integration, and automatic JSON:API support. As well as making it easier for others to extend your custom content by ensuring all the proper hooks and lifecycle events get invoked when new content items get created, updated, and deleted.

In this tutorial we'll:

• Walk through the process of creating a custom content entity

By the end of this lesson you'll be able to create your own custom content entity contained in a module.

One of Drupal's more powerful features is the fine-grained ability to control permissions and control access to content. The Entity API helps enable this functionality by providing an interface to help define access control.

In this tutorial we'll:

• Look at how access control is handled, using Drupal core as an example.
• Demonstrate how to implement access control in a custom module.
• Learn about the hooks that allow developers to modify access control for entities provided by another module.

By the end of this tutorial you should have a better understanding of the entity access control system and how to work with it.

Entities are the building blocks that make up just about everything on a Drupal site. Regardless of whether entities provide configuration information or content, they are absolutely crucial to Drupal's data model.

In this tutorial we'll:

• Look at the overall class hierarchy between the various entity types to see how they're related.
• Examine differences between configuration and content entities in the code that defines them.
• Look at some of the core code required to create an entity type.

By the end of this lesson you should be able to use an example to create a custom entity type in code.

Often when building a site in Drupal you'll find yourself wanting to display a list of nodes, or find entities created by a particular author, or locate some content based on a particular set of criteria. Rather than querying the database directly, Drupal provides a helper class, EntityQuery, to make things a bit easier. The EntityQuery class will probably look very familiar to you if you're familiar with the Database API, or the EntityFieldQuery class in Drupal 7.

In this tutorial we'll:

• Go through several examples of using EntityQuery to find subsets of content.
• Demonstrate how to iterate over the results of an EntityQuery query.

By the end of this tutorial, you should understand how to use entity queries to create custom sets of data from entities.

When learning Drupal development, it won't be long before you encounter the word "entity" and the Entity API. But what are entities in Drupal? How can you use them to build your site? When should you use the Entity API?

This tutorial will explain Drupal's Entity system from a high level. We'll look at:

• The main problems the Entity system solves
• Key terms you should know
• Key concepts we'll explore as we dive into Drupal's Entity API

By the end of this tutorial you should be able to explain the problems that the Entity API solves, and when you should use it in your own code.

Drupal includes the Symfony Validator component, and provides an Entity Validation API to assist in validating the values of fields on an entity. By using the Entity Validation API you can ensure that you're validation logic is applied to Entity CRUD operations regardless of how they are triggered. Whether editing an Entity via a Form API form, or creating a new Entity via the REST API, the same validation code will be used.

Using the Entity Validation API in order to validate the value of a field on an entity requires:

• Defining (or choosing) a constraint plugin
• Defining (or choosing) a validation plugin
• Adding the constraint to the field definition

In this tutorial, we'll look at how this Validation API works and how it can be used in custom code to ensure our entities have properly constructed values. We'll look at how this validation works in Drupal core and how we can add our own additional constraints. We'll also see how to work with the error messages returned from the validator when our entity doesn't pass validation.

Containers are sandboxed applications that can be run anywhere, no matter the underlying host OS. Docker containers are quite different from VMs in a number of ways that need to be understood before we can use them to develop Drupal sites.

In this tutorial, we'll:

• Define a container
• Explain how a container is a more limited environment than a VM

When you are implementing an HTTP API for a decoupled project, one of the critical, but often overlooked, aspects is the API documentation. Documenting your API will allow front-end developers (and you six months from now) to learn how to use that particular API.

In Drupal, there are several modules that can read your site configuration and generate documentation for you automatically.

In this tutorial we're going to:

• Learn about the importance of good documentation.
• Decide whether or not to use an existing specification for our API such as JSON:API or GraphQL.
• Review options for automatically generating documentation.

By the end of this tutorial you'll be able to decide whether or not using an existing documentation specification is a good fit for your project, and choose an option based on those available for use with Drupal.

JSON:API includes a way to request a list of entities of a given resource from the server. Collections are the best way to find content based on filters, and to build listings into the consumers. Moreover, collections can be combined with all the options you can apply to a single resource, like sparse fieldsets and includes.

In this tutorial we'll:

• Learn about what collections are in JSON:API
• Learn how to request, sort, and paginate lists of content

By the end of this tutorial you should know how to retrieve a list of resources from the JSON:API server, and how to optionally sort and paginate the items in the list.

Often, web services require the user to create content. Votes on content, ratings, comments, and user-submitted stories are good examples of this. The JSON:API module supports the creation of entities by sending data in POST requests.

In this tutorial we will:

• Add an appropriate set of HTTP headers to a request that generates a new entity
• Construct a JSON object for the entity we want to create
• Issue a POST request that creates a new article node in Drupal

By the end of this tutorial you should be able to create a POST request that creates a new entity of any type via the JSON:API.

Sometimes unexpected things happen and Drupal needs to generate an error. The JSON:API specification describes how the server should return those errors. Understanding what to expect allows consumers to plan for errors and react gracefully.

In this tutorial we will:

• Discuss how HTTP errors are used in conjunction with JSON:API
• Learn about how JSON:API embeds information about the error encountered into the response object

By the end of this tutorial, you should have a basic understanding of the types of errors you can expect to receive when making JSON:API requests and what you can do to handle them.