Come together with the global Drupal community in Rotterdam, 28 Sept – 1 Oct 2026. Sessions, contribution, connection, and Early Bird savings until 8 June.Currently, the fieldOrderBy() method in an EntityFieldQuery will exclude any Entities where the field value is empty.
This was originally discussed as a bug report in #1611438: fieldOrderBy filters out results with empty field values.
It was determined that the exclusion of entities with empty fields was by design for performance reasons.
This behavior should be documented.
| Comment | File | Size | Author |
|---|---|---|---|
| #16 | 1662950_d7_port_16.patch | 905 bytes | bxtaylor |
| #11 | 1662950_11.patch | 1.05 KB | chx |
| #10 | document-that-EntityField-1662950-10.patch | 1.18 KB | mjonesdinero |
| #7 | document-that-EntityField-1662950-7.patch | 740 bytes | mjonesdinero |
| #2 | document_that_EntityField-1662950-2.patch | 781 bytes | mjonesdinero |
Comments
Comment #1
jhodgdonhttp://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/core!modules!entity!lib!Drupal!entity!E...
Looks like a good Novice project to add a line to the documentation with this note.
Comment #2
mjonesdinero commentedAttached is the patch please feedback if there is some changes
Comment #3
jhodgdonThanks for the patch! The grammar needs a little adjustment though -- the first sentence isn't a sentence. Actually, I think it should probably start with "Note that...". I would also leave out the "this is by design" sentence. Just state what the function does.
Comment #4
bxtaylor commentedAgree with @jhodgdon, should read something like: "Note that Entities with empty field values will be excluded from the EntityFieldQuery results when using the fieldOrderBy() method."
Comment #5
jhodgdonI agree with #4, except that the word "entitites" does not need to be capitalized.
Comment #6
chx commentedYou can add the same to fieldCondition too. Thanks!
Comment #7
mjonesdinero commentedupdate the what bxtaylor and jhodgdon decided
Comment #8
jhodgdonThanks!
A few things to fix:
a) The existing paragraph about "If called multiple times" should not be removed. This new text should probably be added as a separate paragraph.
b) See #6.
Comment #9
jhodgdonforgot status
Comment #10
mjonesdinero commentedthanks jhodgdon
update patch now
Comment #11
chx commentedI moved the second to the fieldOrderBy method itself, not sure why it was on entityOrderBy? And changed the method names to simply "this method".
Comment #12
bxtaylor commentedPatch in #11 looks good to me. Thanks, chx!
Comment #13
mjonesdinero commentedthanks for correcting chx
Comment #14
mjonesdinero commentedComment #15
jhodgdonThanks! Committed to 8.x. The class is in a different file in 7.x, so this needs a port.
Comment #16
bxtaylor commentedHere's the patch for D7.
Comment #17
bxtaylor commentedComment #18
jhodgdonThis patch doesn't seem to include as much as the 8.x patch. Is that because one of the methods doesn't exist in 7.x, or because the patch is incorrect?
Comment #19
bxtaylor commentedI'm looking at the two patches side-by-side:
http://drupal.org/files/1662950_11.patch (chx)
http://drupal.org/files/1662950_d7_port_16.patch (mine)
and there only seems to be a one line difference.
Seem the same, otherwise.
Comment #20
chx commentedI copied the hunks (no headers) into two files and ran diff over them. No textual difference.
Comment #21
jhodgdonMy fault, sorry! I'll get that patch committed. Thanks!
Comment #22
jhodgdonCommitted to 7.x. Thanks again everyone!