Batches, Queues, and Cron

If in the previous chapter, we kept things a bit more theoretical with me throwing “rules” at you, in this chapter, I am going to make up for it and we are going to have some fun. This means we are going to write some code that demonstrates concepts related to data processing, especially larger amounts of it. And in doing so, we are going to cover a few topics.

First, we are going to look back at the hook_post_update_NAME() hook we saw in Chapter 8, The Database API. More specifically, we are going to see how the &$sandbox parameter can be used to handle updates that need to process some data that may take a bit longer and should be split across multiple requests. Next up, we are going to look at standalone batches (which basically use the same system) to process data in batches across multiple requests. And what better example to illustrate this technique than our Importer, which needs to process an undefined number of products?

We...