Entity API

Data types

Last updated on

4 August 2017

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These are the data types to be used for describing entity properties:

Type	Usage
text	Any text.
token	A string containing only lowercase letters, numbers, and underscores; e.g. this type is useful for machine readable names.
integer	A usual PHP integer value.
decimal	A PHP float or integer.
date	A full date and time, as timestamp.
duration	A duration as number of seconds.
boolean	A usual PHP boolean value.
uri	An absolute URI or URL.
entities	You may use the type of each entity known by hook_entity_info(), e.g. 'node' or 'user'. Internally entities are represented by their identifiers.
entity	A special type to be used generically for entities where the entity type is not known beforehand. The entity has to be represented using an EntityMetadataWrapper.
struct	This as well as any else not known type may be used for supporting arbitrary data structures. For that additional metadata has to be specified with the 'property info' key.
list	A list of values, represented as numerically indexed array. The list<TYPE> notation may be used to specify the type of the contained items, where TYPE may be any valid type expression. E.g. use list<node> for a list of nodes.
unknown	Any data. This doesn't have any validation.

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