Storing user data such as preferences in Drupal 8 using the UserData service

Have you ever needed to persist some irregular data relating with a user account? Things like user preferences or settings that are kinda configuration but not really? Storing them as configuration means having to export them, and that’s no option. Storing them in State is an option, but not a good one as you’d have to maintain a State value map with each of your users and who wants to deal with that…

In Drupal 7, if you remember way back when, we had this data column in the user table which meant that we could add to the $user->data array whatever we wanted and it would get serialised and saved in that column (if we saved the user object). So what is the equivalent of this in Drupal 8?

I’m happy to say we have the exact same thing, but of course much more flexible and properly handled. So not exactly the same. But close. We have the user.data service provided by the User module and the users_data table for storage. So how does this work?

First of all, it’s a service. So whenever we need to work with it, we have to get an instance like so:

/** @var UserDataInterface $userData */
$userData = \Drupal::service('user.data');

Of course, you should inject it wherever possible.

The resulting object (by default) will be UserData which implements UserDataInterface. And using this object we can store as many pieces of data or information for a given user as we want. Let’s explore this a bit to learn more.

The interface has 3 methods or handling data: get(), set(), delete(). But the power comes in the method arguments. This is how we can store some data for User 1:

$userData->set('my_module', 1, 'my_preference', 'this is my preference');

So as you can see, we have 4 arguments:

• The module name we want this piece of data to be findable by
• The user ID
• The name of the piece of data
• The value of the piece of data

This is very flexible. First, we can have module specific data. No more colluding with other modules for storing user preferences. Stay in your lane. Second, we can have multiple pieces of data per user, per module. And third, the value is automatically serialised for us so we are not restricted to simple strings.

Retrieving data can be done like so:

$data = $userData->get('my_module', 1, 'my_preference');

This will return exactly this is my preference (in our case). And deserialisation also happens automatically if your data got serialised on input.

Deleting data is just as easy:

$userData->delete('my_module', 1, 'my_preference');

Moreover, most of the arguments of the get() and delete() methods are optional. Meaning you can load/delete multiple pieces of data at once. Check out UserDataInterface to see how omitting some arguments can return/delete sets of records rather than individual ones.

And that is pretty much it. And in true Drupal 8 form, there’s nobody stopping you from overriding the service and using your own UserDataInterface implementation that has that little extra something you are missing. So no, you probably don’t have to create that custom table after all.