Field Resize Example

In this tutorial, we will see how to increase the size of an existing Text (Plain) field in Drupal 8 without losing data using a hook_update_N().

The problem

Drupal's field system is great, however, there are certain things which could be improved. Say, you have a Text (Plain) field named field_one_liner which is 64 characters long. You created around 15 nodes and then you realized that the field size should have been 255. If you try to do this from Drupal's field management UI, you will get a message saying:

There is data for this field in the database. The field settings can no longer be changed.

So, the only way you can resize it is after deleting the existing field! This doesn't make much sense because it is indeed possible to increase field's size without losing data.

Assumptions

It has been assumed that:

• You have intermediate /advanced knowledge of Drupal.
• You know how to develop modules for Drupal.

Prerequisites

If you're going to try out the code provided in this example, make sure you have the following field on any node type:

• Name: One-liner
• Machine name: field_one_liner
• Type: Text (Plain)
• Length: 64

After you configure the field, create some nodes with some data on the One-liner field.

Note: Reducing the length of a field might result in data loss.

Implementing hook_update_N()

hook_update_N() lets you run commands to update the database schema. You can create, update and delete database tables and columns using this hook after your module has been installed. To implement this hook, you need to have a custom module. For this example, I've implemented this hook in a custom module which I've named custom_field_resize.

/**
 * Increase the length of "field_one_liner" to 255 characters.
 */
function custom_field_resize_update_8001() {
}

To change the field size, there are four things we will do inside this hook.

Resize the Columns

We will run a set of queries to update the relevant database columns.

$database = \Drupal::database();
$database->query("ALTER TABLE node__field_one_liner MODIFY field_one_liner_value VARCHAR(255)");
$database->query("ALTER TABLE node_revision__field_one_liner MODIFY field_one_liner_value VARCHAR(255)");

If revisions are disabled then the node__field_one_liner table won't exist. So, you can remove the second query if your entity doesn't allow revisions.

Update Storage Schema

Resizing the columns with a query is not sufficient. Drupal maintains a record of what database schema is currently installed. If we don't do this then Drupal will think that the database schema needs to be updated because the column lengths in the database and will not match the configuration storage.

$storage_key = 'node.field_schema_data.field_one_liner';
$storage_schema = \Drupal::keyValue('entity.storage_schema.sql');
$field_schema = $storage_schema->get($storage_key);
$field_schema['node__field_one_liner']['fields']['field_one_liner_value']['length'] = 255;
$field_schema['node_revision__field_one_liner']['fields']['field_one_liner_value']['length'] = 255;
$storage_schema->set($storage_key, $field_schema);

The above code will update the key_value table to store the updated length of the field_one_liner in it's configuration.

Update Field Configuration

We took care of the database schema data. However, there are other places where Drupal stores the configuration. Now, we will need to tell the Drupal config management system that the field length is 255.

// Update field configuration.
$config = \Drupal::configFactory()
  ->getEditable('field.storage.node.field_one_liner');
$config->set('settings.max_length', 255);
$config->save(TRUE);

Finally, Drupal also stores info about the actively installed configuration and schema. To refresh this, we will need to resave the field storage configuration to make Drupal detect all our changes.

// Update field storage configuration.
FieldStorageConfig::loadByName($entity_type, $field_name)->save();

After this, running drush updb or running update.php from the admin interface should detect your hook_update_N() and it should update your field size. If you're committing your configuration to git, you'll need to run drush config-export after running the database updates to update the config in the filesystem and then commit it.

Conclusion

Though we've talked about resizing a Text (Plain) or varchar field in this tutorial, we can do the same for any field type which can be safely resized using SQL. In certain complex scenarios, it might be necessary to create a temporary table with the new data-structure, copy the existing data into that table with queries and once all the data has been copied successfully, replace the existing the table with the temporary table.

Maybe someday we'll have this resizing feature in Drupal where Drupal will intelligently allow us to increase a field's size from it's field UI and only deny reduction of field size where there is a possibility of data loss.