Creating Drupal 7 Field Groups Programmatically

Question

I am trying to automatically group fields created by my custom module, but it's not quite working. My expectation is that a field group will be created and existing fields would be assigned to it. I'm using the Field Groups module, as it appears to be pretty standard.

As advised on http://drupal.org/node/1606758, I have used ctools bulk export to generate the code. I have moved the following code into my module. Not sure why this isn't working:

My hook_field_group_info() and hook_ctools_plugin_api() are both being hit; the debugging flags I've added are being logged.
The specified fields are named correctly and do exist in the database.

What I might be doing wrong?

========== From Ctools Bulk Exporter: ===========

Place this in nmc_directory.info

name = nmc_directory export module
description = Export objects from CTools
dependencies[] = field_group
package = Chaos tool suite
core = 7.x

Place this in nmc_directory.module

<?php

/**
 * Implements hook_ctools_plugin_api().
 */
function nmc_directory_ctools_plugin_api($module, $api) {
  if ($module == 'field_group' && $api == 'field_group') {
    return array('version' => 1);
  }
}

Place this in nmc_directory.field_group.inc

<?php

/**
 * Implements hook_field_group_info().
 */
function nmc_directory_field_group_info() {
  $field_groups = array();

  $field_group = new stdClass();
  $field_group->disabled = FALSE; /* Edit this to true to make a default field_group disabled initially */
  $field_group->api_version = 1;
  $field_group->identifier = 'group_dir_phys_consumer_info|node|dir_physicians|form';
  $field_group->group_name = 'group_dir_phys_consumer_info';
  $field_group->entity_type = 'node';
  $field_group->bundle = 'dir_physicians';
  $field_group->mode = 'form';
  $field_group->parent_name = '';
  $field_group->data = array(
    'label' => 'Online Medical Providers Directory: Website (Consumer Information)',
    'weight' => '0',
    'children' => array(
      0 => 'dir_phys_gender',
      1 => 'dir_phys_category',
      2 => 'dir_phys_title',
      3 => 'dir_phys_fname',
      4 => 'dir_phys_lname',
      5 => 'dir_phys_suffix',
      6 => 'dir_phys_medfield_1',
      7 => 'dir_phys_medfield_2',
      8 => 'dir_phys_phone_public',
    ),
    'format_type' => 'fieldset',
    'format_settings' => array(
      'label' => 'Online Medical Providers Directory: Website (Consumer Information)',
      'instance_settings' => array(
        'required_fields' => 1,
        'classes' => '',
        'description' => '',
      ),
      'formatter' => 'collapsed',
    ),
  );
  $field_groups['group_dir_phys_consumer_info|node|dir_physicians|form'] = $field_group;

  return $field_groups;
}

doub1ejack doub1ejack · Accepted Answer · 2013-02-28T19:45:49

For future reference - this code (and the approach) works perfectly.

My problem was that this module is getting so large (4 content types, 60+ fields, 6 vocabularies, etc) that it runs pretty slowly on my localhost. When I ran it on my staging server, it worked very nicely. I bumped up the max execution time on my localhost php.ini and its working fine locally now too.

FWIW: I was able to use /devel/reinstall (from the Devel module) to reinstall the module a little faster than going through the module admin page. Not sure why this didn't timeout too, but it didn't.

Edit: hmm.. so several days later, I'm not as certain that the problem was entirely due to the php execution time. That played a part (some fields were never created + plus other problems), but now uninstalling & reinstalling my module produces scattered results with the field groups.

some field groups do not appear at all (there is no record in the {field_group} table in the DB)
however, the Bulk Exporter module does list my groups as being available for export
field groups that are added don't necessarily apply the specified weights to their children
field groups appear to be removed when uninstalling my module (which follows this methodology)

Creating Drupal 7 Field Groups Programmatically

1 Answers