Recently I have upgraded my Docker4Drupal environment while xdebug in PHPStorm stopped working for me. Investigating PHP container logs, revealed the following message:

Usually when working with a list of entites in the form and you need to reference them you will probobaly use the entity_autocomplete form element. This is fine if we only need the entity ID (target_id) to work with and later load the referenced entity to get other values from it.

Since you are reading this post you already aware that Drupal autocomplete field widget is showing entity ID (reference ID) along with the entity reference label. It has been like this since I remember using Drupal for the first time (Drupal 6). Usually taxonomy terms are the ones that we use for keywords, categories, etc. Some users find showing ID in brackets annoying. One of them was my latest client, this is where motivation is coming from.

When we create our custom plugins in Drupal 8, we sometimes need them to be executed in a particular order.

For example, if we would run a text analyzer that finds frequencies of words and frequent phrases, we would first want to run the HTML filter which strips out all tags and/or special characters and then execute the text analyzer. Whatever the reason be, Drupal 8 default plugin manager Drupal\Core\Plugin\DefaultPluginManager has a method called getDefinitions.

When working with routes for an entity, you have probably created a route path with parameter in the following format /node/{node}/edit where name node was your custom entity ID.

What is interesting about this path format is that the parameter {node} gets converted into an entity object and is later available inside your controller action as an argument. The process is called route upcasting. Let's dig deeper to see how it works.