Default to use EntityCache if available, and create necessary cache bin tables

I'm not keen on having the bin tables auto-created even if there is no entitycache module available. Maybe, we can enable support for that only if another cache bin is configured? Or we could make a hidden conf variable for that?

I guess most people are going to use other cache backends anyway.

>It's possible that this change might make more sense going into the EntityCache module itself.

I like that idea. It would be great if the EntityCache module could care about creating the cache bins, or maybe just go with an "entitycache" cache bin by default and making using custom bins optional.

Once we've that working I think it's not up to the entity.api module any more to enable entitycache by default, but users could just do

 'entity cache' => TRUE,
 'field cache' => module_exists('entitycache'),

.

Thus, moving over to entitycache.

(double post)

I would like entitycache to create bins automatically, however it's probably not going to happen for this reason:

Creating bins is probably fine - do a db_table_exists() check in hook_modules_installed() and check entity_get_info() for new modules.

Removing bins won't work - when a module is uninstalled, hook_entity_info() won't return information about the entity type being removed, so we can't remove the bin.

If someone can come up with a relatively simple workaround for this that'd be great, but otherwise I'm not keen.

See also #1199946: Disabled modules are broken beyond repair so the "disable" functionality needs to be removed.

Related issue in Countries issue queue. I have created a new module for entity cache integration. see #1397762: Entity cache integration

Also hit this for profile2. I posted a patch over there against Entity API. It suffers from the problem catch denotes in #5, I didn't think of that (it's untested so far).

Here's a patch, which builds on that and simply tracks the tables to drop in a variable. Not the most beatiful solution, obviously, but it works. We're simply missing a hook_modules_pre_uninstalled() or something.

Not setting to needs review, as this is against entity module.

So I posted patches against ECK and Field collection to add entity cache support and we've done it by implementing a simple boilerplate module that just depends on both Entitycache and the module providing the entity, which just seems like a neat way to sidestep this whole issue.

#1268620: Use Entity Cache in Field Collection
#1506468: EntityCache support

Created #2017685: Automatically create cache tables for entities that want to support entitycache.module in the Entity API queue.

see fago's follow up in the entity api queue: #2017685-2: Automatically create cache tables for entities that want to support entitycache.module

This was fixed in Entity API (see #2017685).

Thanks!