Contrib.social

Deprecate FIELD_LOAD_* constants

Open on Drupal.org →
Created on 4 September 2013, almost 12 years ago
Updated 7 August 2025, 16 days ago

- Those constants are used for "field loading" logic. This used to be part of a public API (field_attach_load() & friend), but this logic is now internal to the storage controllers, and there is no external facing API for those operations.
So the storage controllers using those constants is fine, but external code referring to them feels like messing with something you're not supposed to know.

- Even within storage controllers: the rest of the entity loading code rather uses a boolean $load_revision flag, and "translates" it to one of the constants when doing "field stuff":

protected function attachLoad(&$queried_entities, $load_revision = FALSE) {
  $this->loadFieldItems($queried_entities, $load_revision ? FIELD_LOAD_REVISION : FIELD_LOAD_CURRENT);

Looks like two different systems talking to each other - which *was* the case, but is now a bit absurd within one single class / class hierarchy.

📌 Task
Status

Postponed: needs info

Version

11.0 🔥

Component

entity system

Created by

🇫🇷France yched

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  • Comment 16 days ago →
    🇺🇸United States smustgrave

    Thank you for creating this issue to improve Drupal.

    We are working to decide if this task is still relevant to a currently supported version of Drupal. There hasn't been any discussion here for over 8 years which suggests that this has either been implemented or is no longer relevant. Your thoughts on this will allow a decision to be made.

    Since we need more information to move forward with this issue, the status is now Postponed (maintainer needs more info). If we don't receive additional information to help with the issue, it may be closed after three months.

    Thanks!

  • Comment 16 days ago →
    🇬🇧United Kingdom longwave UK

    #30 still stands today, the weirdness is that the constants are defined in core then used once in file.module and once in Views, but these uses could probably be swapped to self-contained constants in each of those cases; it doesn't make much sense to share them. Neither of the things in #30 has happened in the time since that was posted, though. Maybe we just make those issues, postpone this on them happening, and wait another ten years?

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