Migrating Drupal 7 textfield to Drupal 8 vocabulary

In our Drupal 7 site we have an enhanced textfield that autocompletes already stored values. When migrating to Drupal 8 we could normalize this by using a vocabulary and terms instead.

So in our current Drupal 7 setup we have something like:

Content type: Employee

And in Drupal 8 we want this instead:

Vocabulary: Role

Content type: Employee

Using entity_generate process plugin

The first approach we can take is to use the entity_generate plugin provided by Migrate Plus module.

In our migration file:

process:
  field_role:

    # Plugin to use
    plugin: entity_generate

    # Field from source configuration
    source: field_role

    # Value to compare in the bundle
    value_key: name

    # Bundle key value
    # If you get errors consider using only bundle
    bundle_key: vid

    # Bundle machine name
    bundle: role

    # Type of entity
    entity_type: taxonomy_term

    # Set to true to ignore case on lookup
    ignore_case: true

Running this migration will take the value of the textfield and try to lookup the term by name on the destination and if it does not exist the term will be created.

In the second part of this article (coming soon) we will take a look at how we can deal with translations.