Allow fields other than title to be used as the entity label

This seems like a really sensible solution. Unfortunately I lack the time to work on this myself at the moment (baby due any moment), but I welcome any help in solving this issue.

Thanks for your contribution imclean,

The patch looks promising, but I would like to see all added functionality under test before I commit it.

I think you have answered your own question. There currently is no specific test for the label field and/or method, but there should be, so that's what needs to be tested.

This is working for me, and IMO this is a pretty major issue for making ECK more versatile and usable in a wider variety of situations. About 1/2 of my entity types don't have a Title field, but do have another field I want to use for labeling.

Rerolled the patch as it no longer applied to the latest head.

This issue still needs test coverage for the new functionality.

While testing the patch manually I found that you can only use textfields as the label. In my opinion fields like date, list (text) or email could be valid labels as well.

Also looking at the code. I think you could replace

$bundle = $this->bundle();
$bundle->getEntityType()->getLabelField();
$config_dependency = $this->getEntityType()->getBundleConfigDependency($bundle);
$config = \Drupal::config($config_dependency['name']);
$label_field = $config->get('label_field');

with

$label_field = $this->bundle()->label_field;

Patch is failing on latest dev, is this something that is going to be turned into a stable feature?

Here is a reroll and refactor of some of the code in the previous patch. I went with an event to allow customization of the available field types since hardcoding it seemed too rigid.

I also removed the conditional checking for the "field_" prefix, because custom fields might not have that if they were created in code.

This is barely tested yet, but I needed to get a working version of the patch for the latest dev.

Adding a related issue, which might also be the one making this patch no longer apply. They aren't solving the same thing, but they are solving similar things related to customizing the label.

Attempting a reroll against the latest dev. Let's see how well this works.

Thanks bmcclure
Somehow the label field setting is not always saved successfully
It's still showing the default title instead of the custom field

Slightly off topic

If anybody is looking for a quick way to solve this I used https://www.drupal.org/project/auto_entitylabel

1. Install above module
2. Enable title for entity type
3. Configure title to be auto generated with tokens and hidden from display.|

Thanks Dan

I've re-rolled against latest release (beta 2) in case anyone needs.

Also, re-rolled against latest dev version.

Can also report that the custom label configuration is not reliably being saved. I'll investigate if I get a chance.

Replaced \Drupal::entityManager() with $this->entityFieldManager.

use short array syntax as per new coding standard.

Needs work

Haven't scrolled the issue yet but please keep an eye on the core and AEL issues raising and getting progress regarding base fields. I think it is important to sync overlapping efforts here.

Too many to link them all here but some out of my head:
#3088103: Entity label (title) field shouldn't be a base field but a required option to choose a field for.
#2353867: [META] Expose Title and other base fields in Manage Display
#3043592: Allow entity to display label field as normal
#2877400: Find a way to make title handling generic in entity templates

I don't think this is an ideal solution to the problem. By requiring to select a field and using the raw string value of that field as label, you exclude the possibility of using fields that require some kind of formatting before being used as a label, like for example date fields. I'm inclined to close this as won't fix: the title field as it exists now is good for most use cases, the Automatic Entity Label module can be used for more complex use cases. If we really were to go for this solution, I wouldn't allow to select date fields, otherwise it'll only be a matter of time before people start to ask how to change the date format.