Emily Newsom

As Development Director, Emily oversees all of Brightflock's development projects. Prior to co-launching Brightflock in 2008, Emily developed enterprise Java systems for the biotechnology industry. Emily is an avid proponent of open source software (but without the beard!) and has contributed to a number of OSS projects including Firefox, Ubuntu, WordPress and Drupal. Emily holds an honors BSc in Computer Science from the University of Victoria.

My personal site can be found here

Emily Newsom's blog »
Posted on Thursday, February 16, 2012 in Drupal, Implementation

One of the big changes in Drupal 7 was to create another abstraction layer above nodes, users, etc. This abstraction layer allows one to access all of the various components as "entities". In Drupal 6, I always felt the push to make everything be a node, so this abstraction layer solves that problem--just treat everything as an entity and don't force the node issue.

So how do you query for entities? Like a lot of ORMs, Drupal now has its own query language--one can use EntityFieldQuery to query for any entity. Now if anyone has worked with EntityFieldQuery, it can be a bit (!) verbose. The problem I ran into is that 90% of the time I am looking for nodes only, so why do I need to deal with entities? Well, I threw together a subclass of EntityFieldQuery that only queries for nodes. Seems like a pretty obvious class to have in the core to speed up node queries, but I couldn't find anything of the sort so I wrote my own. Lets hope we get something like this in D8 before node_load_multiple's conditions get removed.

/*
 * NodeFieldQuery - An EntityFieldQuery object just for loading nodes because that's what we want 90% of the time.
 */
class NodeFieldQuery extends EntityFieldQuery {
 
    public function __contruct($type = null) {
        parent::__construct();
 
        $this->entityCondition('entity_type', 'node');
 
        if ($type) {
            $this->entityCondition('bundle', $type);
        }
    }
 
    public function load() {
        $result = $this->execute();
 
        if (!isset($result['node'])) {
            return array();
        }
 
          $nids = array_keys($result['node']);
          $nodes = entity_load('node', $nids);
 
        return $nodes;
    }
}
 
/* Usage */
$q = new NodeFieldQuery('project');
$q->fieldCondition('field_project_company', 'nid', $company->nid, '=');
$projects = $q->load();