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Entity Overview

Improved EntityListBuilders with support for paging, table sorting, table dragging, filtering, bulk actions, database queries and more.

Why?

At Wieni, we're not a big fan of the Views module and for a couple of reasons:

• we're programmers, we don't like to create functionality by clicking through the Drupal interface and especially not the bloated Views interface
• we prefer to write our own database or entity queries, it gives us more flexibility when filtering and including non-entity field data and it makes it easier to optimize queries

That's why a couple of years ago we decided to disable the module altogether and we ended up with the EntityListBuilder based listings.

Those proved to be lacking in functionality and user friendliness soon enough, which is how we ended up creating this module: the perfect middle ground between Views and EntityListBuilder. It offers all features of the latter, plus the following:

• Exposed filtering with a custom form
• Behind-the-scenes filtering using custom database queries
• Table sorting, configurable on a per-column basis
• Bulk actions using core Action plugins
• Override built-in entity listings with a custom one, on an entity type or bundle level
• Override any route with a custom entity listing

Installation

This package requires PHP 7.1 and Drupal 8 or higher. It can be installed using Composer:

How does it work?

Create an overview

Overviews are Drupal plugins with the @OverviewBuilder annotation. Every annotation needs at least the entity_type and id parameters to function.

There are three base classes you can choose from:

• OverviewBuilderBase: the most basic entity overview with support for database queries, paging and table sort
• FilterableOverviewBuilderBase: an entity overview combining the base functionality with an exposed filter form
• DraggableOverviewBuilderBase: an entity overview with a draggable, re-orderable table, but without support for paging or filtering

Example

Override en existing entity listing

You can override the default entity listing with a custom overview by adding the override parameter to the annotation. In case the entity type is not recognised by this module, you can add the route_name and pass the route name of the entity listing instead.

It is also possible to override the entity listing only when a certain combination of filters is active. This way, you could for example add extra filters or table columns when your overview is filtered by a certain bundle.

Examples

Render an overview

When you create an overview without overriding an existing route, you will have to render it somewhere manually.

Creating an instance of an entity overview is done the same way as other Drupal plugins, by using the createInstance method of OverviewBuilderManager.

Another option is adding _entity_overview to the defaults section of your route definition, with as value the plugin id.

Example

Filter storages

Entity overviews with exposed filter forms need a place to (temporarily) store their filter values. That's where filter storages come to play: an abstraction in the way these values are stored.

By default, two storage methods are included: query, which stores values as query parameters in the URL and session, which stores values in the session storage.

Custom storage methods can be added by creating a Drupal plugin with the @FilterStorage annotation and an id parameter, implementing FilterStorageInterface and optionally extending FilterStorageBase.

The default storage method is query, but this can be changed by adding a filter_storage parameter to @OverviewBuilder annotations.

Add bulk actions

Bulk actions can be added to your overview by implementing BulkActionOverviewBuilderInterface and the getBulkActionPlugins method. This method can return two kinds of arrays:

• an associative array with the plugin IDs as keys and the labels as values
• a flat array with plugin ID's

In the last case the default plugin labels will be used.

It is possible to attach a configuration form to your action plugin by implementing PluginFormInterface. In case you need access to the entities in your form validate and/or submit handlers, you can implement ActionPluginFormInterface instead. Note that in contrary to PluginFormInterface this is a custom interface, only supported by this module.

Hooks and events

hook_entity_overview_alter

This hook is only called when using overrides or when using the _entity_overview default in routes. An event equivalent to the hook is also provided: WmEntityOverviewEvents::ENTITY_OVERVIEW_ALTER

Examples

hook_entity_overview_alternatives_alter

This hook is only called in the OverviewBuilderManager::getAlternatives method. An event equivalent to the hook is also provided: WmEntityOverviewEvents::ENTITY_OVERVIEW_ALTERNATIVES_ALTER

Example

Changelog

All notable changes to this project will be documented in the CHANGELOG file.

Security

If you discover any security-related issues, please email [email protected] instead of using the issue tracker.

License

Distributed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for more information.