Get created term entity after creating term programatically

Question

I'm writing a custom Drupal Console command to import user data from a text file and create users, and as part of the process, I need to add data to a term reference field. In the case that a term in the data doesn't exist, I need to create the term and then add the new tid to the the field. I'm using the following code to create the term:

$term = Term::create([
  'name' => $member[$roster_key],
  'vid' => 'topic_area',
])->save();

The problem is the save() method only returns a boolean indicating if the save was successful, NOT the created term object. This means that now that my term has been created, I have to go do an entity query just to get the object I just created.

Is there a simple way to get the just-created term in my code above, or do I really have to do a separate query?

Answer 1

Term::create() returns the entity that the save() method gets called on. So what you want to do is save that entity to a var before calling the save() method on it.

$term = Term::create([
  'name' => $member[$roster_key],
  'vid' => 'topic_area',
]);
$term->save();

//Retrieve the tid of the new term
$term->tid->getValue();