Module Development

Introduction to Entity Classes for Drupal 7

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This tutorial covers a topic in Drupal 7 which may or may not be the version you're using. We're keeping this tutorial online as a courtesy to users of Drupal 7, but we consider it archived.

Alternate resources

Sprout Video

This lesson introduces students to Entity classes and illustrates what each of the main Entity classes does, followed by a more in depth look at the CRUD operations provided by the base entity class, and finally demonstrates overriding the default Entity class with our own custom Entity object to define a defaultUrl() for our entities and a new implementation of hook_menu where we can view an entity.

Note: At the end of the this video code is added to hook_entity_info() that references a VideoEntityUIController class, however, the definition of that class is in our sample code, but was not shown being added here. And it is necessary to follow along with the videos. If you're following along you'll want to add the following code to the bottom of your videoasset.module file. If you're curious about what it does it's explained in the last part of this video.


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

Entity API demos on GitHub