Working with managed files

In this section, we will look at two examples of working with managed files. First, we will see how we can import product images from our fictional remote JSON-based API. Second, we will see how to create a custom form element that allows us to upload a file, and use it in a brand new CSV based importer.

Attaching managed files to entities

Now that we have our product image field in place and we can store images, let's revisit our JSON response that contains the product data and assume it looks something like this now:

{
  "products" : [
    {
      "id" : 1,
      "name": "TV",
      "number": 341,
      "image": "tv.jpg"
    },
    {
      "id" : 2,
      "name": "VCR",
      "number": 123,
      "image": "vcr.jpg"
    }
  ]
}

What's new is the addition of the image key for each product, which simply references a filename for the image that goes with the respective product. The actual location of the images is at some other path we need to include in the code.

Going...