Programmatically Create Field Collections in Drupal

I've been working on a pretty big site restructure this week and as part of the restructure I needed to migrate data from some custom database tables into Field Collections to offer a bit more flexibility. Most of the code documented was available on drupal.org but there was definitely a lot of different ways mentioned and no clean cut function for you to reuse. If you're just looking for a cut a paste, here's the code. I will explain it further below but it's pretty well commented anyway.

<?php 
/**
 * Creates a field collection.
 *
 * @param $parent
 * @param $type
 * @param $collection_name
 * @param $values
 * @return object
 */
function _module_name_add_field_collection($parent, $type, $collection_name, $values) {

  // Create entity using the entity name and set the parent.
  $field_collection_item = entity_create('field_collection_item', array('field_name' => $collection_name));
  $field_collection_item->setHostEntity($type, $parent);

  // EMW makes it easier for us to work with the field_collection
  $field_collection_item_w = entity_metadata_wrapper('field_collection_item', $field_collection_item);

  // Add the fields to the entity.
  foreach($values as $key => $value) {
    $field_collection_item_w->{$key}->set($value);
  }

  // Save the entity.
  $field_collection_item_w->save();

  return $field_collection_item;
}
?>

Usage

If you need some further help here is a breakdown of each parameter. $parent - This is the parent of the field collection. This will usually be a node or taxonomy object but it can also be a field collection. $type - This is the type of the parent. It could have probably been pulled from the parent object. This should be node, taxonomy_term or field_collection_item. $collection_name - This is the name of the field collection field. If you have a node with a field called "field_pricing" which is a field collection then this parameter should be field_pricing" $values - Key values pairs of data that should be added to the field collection. The keys will be field names that are within the field collection.