How to automatically update entity that is created programatically?

Question

Using Entity API, I can create entities easily like this:

// SomeEntity class extends ContentEntityBase
$entity = SomeEntity::create(['my_id' => 'id123']);
$entity->save();

Works fine as long as my_id is unique. When it's not, I get EntityStorageException with message complaining about my_id not being unique. I could first try to load entity to see if it exists and update it manually but that seems like unnecessary overhead.

Is there a way to automatically save or update existing entity programatically?

Answer 1

Not really. To figure out if an entity exists, you have to check that somehow.

If you're trying to optimize, you could run an entity query instead of loading it completely. But in case you want to update, you need to load the original entity anyway, so just do that.

$entity = SomeEntity::load(['my_id' => 'id123']);
if (!$entity) {
  $entity = SomeEntity::create(['my_id' => 'id123']);
}
$entity->save();

Answer 2

Using SomeEntity::load() first manually and then manually updating fields if entity exists seemed like huge overhead and inefficient. In that case, how Entity::save() knows if it's saving new entity or loaded from database? My investigation led me to EntityStorageBase::create() method which invokes Entity::enforceIsNew(true).

So the answer seems to be simple: make sure that the entity that was created via SomeEntity::create() was explicitly instructed that it should not enforce new when saving. This seems to work fine:

// SomeEntity class extends ContentEntityBase
$entity = SomeEntity::create(['my_id' => 'id123']);
// Call Entity::enforceIsNew(false) only if you know that entity already exists.
$entity->enforceIsNew(false);
$entity->save();

Note that entities might have metadata attached like creation date, author etc. This approach would overwrite and lose that.