Thanks and suggestion

[AlexHoebart-ICPDR]

Thank you very much @argiepiano for this very good and clear tutorial and that you introduced it at Backdrop LIVE!

I previously failed to create custom entities following some other docs. I don't remember how, but it was much more complicated and did not work well, so I gave up.
But with this tutorial it was really easy for me to follow and use it for my own application. Thanks!!

I have one suggestion, which could be useful to add to the ed4.module as it is also not so obvious:
Like it is now, the "created" field is just displayed as a number in a View, because it is an integer field in the table.
To make it a readable date field in a View, the Views handlers need to be adapted.

/**
 * Implements hook_views_data_alter(&$data)
 */
function ed4_views_data_alter(&$data) {
  // Set field handler for date fields
  $data['student']['created']['field']['handler'] = 'views_handler_field_date';

  // Set sort handler for date fields
  $data['student']['created']['sort']['handler'] = 'views_handler_sort_date';

  // Set filter handler for date fields
  $data['student']['created']['sort']['handler'] = 'views_handler_filter_date';
}

This works when placed in the ed4.module. According to docs, it should be in ed4.views.inc but then it needs a hook_views_api in ed4.module. I don't know why this would be needed like this, I guess just for clear separation.

[argiepiano]

Hi @AlexHoebart-ICPDR. Thanks for the comments and the code!

Yes, the code you have will provide the correct handler for 'created', and is really good to have.

However, since the 4th tutorial uses Entity Plus, there is a simpler way to tell Views to use the correct handler: provide the correct property info about 'created' (a date Entity Plus property type). I've done just that by adding an implementation of hook_entity_property_info_alter() in a file called ed4.info.inc which is loaded automatically by Entity Plus. Take a look! It's a really handy way to tell Entity Plus and Entity Tokens to use the correct formatter.

[AlexHoebart-ICPDR]

Even better, thanks.
I just wonder how things like this are documented.
And just for info: one of the not so good examples is this: https://github.com/backdrop-contrib/examples/tree/1.x-1.x/entity_example
But that I found previously, as it is part of the examples module, which D7 migrants are likely to know.

[argiepiano]

@AlexHoebart-ICPDR this (property info) is document in entity_plus.api.php. I also find these pages very helpful:
https://www.drupal.org/docs/7/api/entity-api

We should really clone those pages and move them to the wiki of Entity Plus.

[argiepiano]

The example in the examples module is ported from Examples for Developers in D7, which are examples without the use of Entity Plus (nor Entity API in D7). In addition, that example doesn't account for some of the entity changes in Backdrop. To compound things, that Examples module is a bit abandoned (I mean, some of the PRs submitted in the last year or two by the maintainer are more cosmetic than anything else).