Contrib process plugin: entity_generate

The entity_generate plugin, provided by the contributed Migrate Plus module, is used to match existing entities (by entity type, bundle type, and value_key) and generate entities that don’t yet exist. The most common use is for taxonomy term reference fields.

Taxonomy Terms Example with Documentation

Here’s a taxonomy term example using all of the possible configuration parameters (spacing and commenting only for documentation purposes):

process:
  field_tags:
    plugin: entity_generate
    source: 'Tag'
    value_key: name
    bundle_key: vid
    bundle: tags
    entity_type: taxonomy_term
    ignore_case: true
    default_values:
      status: 1
    values:
      description: 'Tag description'

Example of Generating Multiple Taxonomy Terms

If you have multiple terms in your source, for example tags: great;helpful;awesome, you can split them up with the Migrate plugin Explode where the data is separated before being piped on to entity_generate and get created:

process:
  field_tags:
    - plugin: explode
      source: tags
      delimiter: ';'
    - plugin: entity_generate
      value_key: name
      bundle_key: vid
      bundle: tags
      entity_type: taxonomy_term

A single term import can be done like this:

process:
  field_photo_category:
    plugin: entity_generate
    source: photo_category
    value_key: name
    bundle_key: vid
    bundle: image_category
    entity_type: taxonomy_term

Create terms and insert custom field values at the same time

Vocabulary terms can have extra fields, and it’s possible to generate a non-existing term, while at the same time inserting a value into another field. This example shows how to loop over a nested JSON-file, create a non-existing term, and populate a multi-value field.

JSON source:

[
  {
    "companies": [
      {
        "company_name": "Company INC.",
        "company_link": "https://example.org/"
      },
      {
        "company_name": "ABC Company",
        "company_link": "https://example.com/"
      }
    ]
  }
]

Combining sub_process and entity_generate:

process:
  taxonomy_vocabulary_4:
    plugin: sub_process
    source: companies
    process:
      target_id:
        plugin: entity_generate
        source: company_name
        value_key: name
        bundle_key: vid
        bundle: vocabulary_4
        entity_type: taxonomy_term
        values:
          field_link/value: company_link

Example of Generating/Looking Up Nodes by Title

Node generation is similar to taxonomy terms, but the bundle_key for nodes is type (for the content type of the node):

process:
  field_related_articles:
    plugin: entity_generate
    source: 'title'
    entity_type: node
    bundle: article
    value_key: title
    bundle_key: type
    default_values:
      title: 'Title missing'
    values:
      title: 'title'

Example of Generating Users

The following example was taken from a migration for a comment:

process:
  uid:
    - plugin: skip_on_empty
      method: row
      source: 'Author email'
      message: 'Author email is required but missing.'
    - plugin: entity_generate
      entity_type: user
      value_key: mail
      values:
        name: 'Author email'

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