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What causes "mismatched" entity definitions, and best practice for fixing on a production site?

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Created on 20 January 2025, 3 months ago

Problem/Motivation

I'm trying to understand what issues cause these "Mismatched entity and/or field definitions". I thought this might be caused solely by changes in the "Base field definitions" i.e. the fields defined in an entity's class file's "baseFieldDefinitions" method. but I had this issue come up for "File" entity types, and this might be an issue with legacy settings from the file entity module and migrating to core, but I see this:

Entity/field definitions:
Mismatched entity and/or field definitions
The following changes were detected in the entity type and field definitions.
File
The File type field needs to be updated.

These errors were always a bit esoteric to me, but I've been playing more with custom entity types lately, and I feel like I have a better understanding of what's causing this, but based on the class file alone, I couldn't really spot any issues. I mentioned I'm using file entity as well, which extends the core File entity and adds some additional base fields (e.g. type).

So I ran a little experiment, I checked the File entity class in the core file module, and confirmed this uses the "file_managed" table. So I ran a DESCRIBE on that table:

MariaDB [db]> describe file_managed;
+----------+---------------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
| Field    | Type                | Null | Key | Default | Extra          |
+----------+---------------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
| fid      | int(10) unsigned    | NO   | PRI | NULL    | auto_increment |
| uuid     | varchar(128)        | NO   | UNI | NULL    |                |
| langcode | varchar(12)         | NO   |     | NULL    |                |
| uid      | int(10) unsigned    | YES  | MUL | NULL    |                |
| filename | varchar(255)        | YES  |     | NULL    |                |
| uri      | varchar(255)        | NO   | MUL | NULL    |                |
| filemime | varchar(255)        | YES  |     | NULL    |                |
| filesize | bigint(20) unsigned | YES  |     | NULL    |                |
| status   | tinyint(4)          | NO   | MUL | NULL    |                |
| created  | int(11)             | YES  |     | NULL    |                |
| changed  | int(11)             | NO   | MUL | NULL    |                |
| type     | varchar(32)         | NO   | MUL | NULL    |                |
+----------+---------------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+

Then I ran the "drush entup" command from this module, and looked at the DESCRIBE output again, and it was identical... I would have assumed that if this was a detected error, there would have been some change. There also isn't any detectable config change when trying to export configuration. So what was the mismatch?

The next part I am curious about is how to go about fixing this error on a production site. This module is pretty explicit that it should not be used in production environments. But in this case, I don't see any other clear way to resolve the issue without the entup command. So what is the recommended approach? I suppose part of that is answer my last question. This is just a difficult area to penetrate in Drupal, and it would help greatly to provide some guidance in this area.

Bonus points if you have any idea what's wrong with my file entity, and know how I can fix it without entup.

💬 Support request
Status

Active

Version

5.0

Component

Base system

Created by

🇺🇸United States bburg Washington D.C.

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Comments & Activities

  • Issue created by @bburg
  • Comment 3 months ago →
    🇺🇸United States bburg Washington D.C.
  • Comment 3 months ago →
    🇺🇸United States bburg Washington D.C.

    Reading my entity warning more carefully:

    File type field

    It's pointing to the field that the file entity module adds to the managed_file table. Did some more research, and it looks to be related to #3056070: Mismatched entity and/or field definitions updating from 8.6 to 8.7 → . Yes, this is an older site that was originally built in D8 using file_entity. I had a ticket to handle the migration at one point, but looking back, it seems that was closed in error.

  • Comment 3 months ago →
    🇺🇸United States bburg Washington D.C.

    And as I was investigating this prior to starting to module and core updates, I run those, and now I get even more entity mismatch issues with these:

    Taxonomy term
    The Publish state field needs to be installed.
    The Unpublish state field needs to be installed.

    I did run the core database updates, and they finished without any issues, so I'm just a bit confused why these are showing up.

    I'm looking at this " Mismatched entity and/or field definitions → " module, but it seems like that just provides a UI for the drush command that this module provides. So again, it's just confusing what site maintainers are supposed to do about these warnings.

  • Comment 3 months ago →
    🇮🇹Italy plach Venezia

    So again, it's just confusing what site maintainers are supposed to do about these warnings

    The short answer is “nothing”: those errors should be fixed via an update function by the module providing the field definitions. I’ll try to expand on this when I have a keyboard under my fingers 😉

    Sometimes a change occurs in a field definition property not having a direct impact on the DB schema, e.g. the field label, but those count as mismatches as well.

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