How can I add a new value to a multi-value field programmatically?

Question

I have a multi-value textfield that stores the user agent string. I want to store the user agent every time the user logs in (this may not in fact be a good idea, but for sake of example).

The following code will save the user agent, but only in the first position. It replaces the old value instead of creating a new one.

function MYMODULE_user_login($account) {
  $account->set("field_useragent", $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']);
  $account->save();
}

How can I add a new value each time this is called?

Answer 1

Using this:

$account->get('field_useragent')->appendItem($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']);

However, that doesn't seem like a good idea to me. Over time, that list will grow big, multi-value fields don't scale that well. All values are always loaded, on save, all values are inserted again into the database.

Maybe you want a list of unique user agents, but even that is hard to control with versions and so on. If you want a log, then save it somewhere else in your own table.

http://wizzlern.nl/sites/wizzlern.nl/files/artikel/drupal-content-entity-8.0.pdf doesn't have this yet, would probably make sense to add it.