GSoC’ 16: Port Search Configuration module; coding week #4

Google Summer of Code (GSoC), has entered into the mid-Term evaluation stage. This is a 1 week period from 21- 27 June, were students and mentors present the progress of their projects. Based on the reports submitted, students are made pass/ fail.

I have been working on porting Search Configuration to Drupal 8 in the past few weeks. If you would like to have a quick glimpse of my past activities on this port process, please go through these posts.

last week, I could learn some Drupal concepts which were really helpful for my project. In the previous versions of Drupal, the role permissions were stored in a role_permissions table in the Database. But now, in Drupal 8, the role permissions are directly stored in the role configuration entity.

So, as described above, in D7 and its preceding versions, role permissions were stored in a role_permissions database which had the role Id and the corresponding permissions. The permissions distributed to a role was retrieved in D7 using:

$permissions = role->getPermissions();

But, in D8, this is done by the

$permissions = role->getPermissions();

Another instance is that, to grant certain permissions to roles.

In D7 it was controlled by,

user_role_grant_permissions($rid, array(‘ access content’));

The role configuration entity remodels this functionality in D8 to:

$role->grantPermission(‘ access content’);

In connection with the term permissions, the most important aspect in Drupal is a hook: hook_permissions(). This hook, obviously as you might have guessed, distributes the permissions to various users; decides whether a particular user should be allowed to access a page or a content, granting and restricting the access.

This hook has been replaced in Drupal 8 by a module.permissions.yml file. This file contains the permissions and its specifications. We can write a driver function in a php file to add the dynamic permissions. This can be achieved by making a driver class in the php file and adding the behaviour of the permission we need in the member functions of the class. We also have to link this PHP file with our yml file to keep it active. This is done by adding a callback function in the yml file which references this php file.

To display special characters in a plain text string for display as HTML format, Drupal earlier versions used the function check_plain.  This had the general syntax:

check_plain($text); // where $text was the string to be processed.

This function has got deprecated in Drupal 8. This has been replaced by the \Drupal\Compoent\Utility\Html::escape($text).