Drupal 8 Module Development

Batch operations

Now that we have a basic understanding of Drupal's capabilities to do multi-request processing, let's switch gears and look at the Batch API.

In order to demonstrate how this works, we are going to rebuild the way our product JsonImporter plugin processes the product data it retrieves. Currently, we simply load all the products into an array of objects and loop through each, saving them to the database. So if there are 100,000 products in the JSON response, we might get into trouble with this approach. To be fair, if the remote provider has so many products, it usually provides a paginated way of requesting them by passing an offset and a limit. This keeps the payloads smaller (which is good for both communicating servers) ...