I had over 400 historical PDF documents I needed to import and display on the front end in a table view. The table needed to include multiple columns for fields such as title, file name and date, and be sortable and searchable. In order for Drupal to recognize the files and allow me to create a view, the files had to be imported as media entities. To accomplish this I used FTP to upload the documents, a spreadsheet and migration modules to create the media entities, and the views module for creating the table.

Steps

Rename and Upload Documents

Rename documents to be uploaded by replacing spaces and underscores with a dash. If using Windows, here’s a way to do this in bulk.
Connect to your site via FTP.
Create a new directory under your public file directory. The Drupal default is /sites/default/files, but yours may be different. Name it whatever makes sense to you. I am using ‘historical’ in my example.
Upload the documents to the new directory.

Create Spreadsheet

Create a new spreadsheet using Excel or Google sheets. The column headers serve as the field names for the media entity we will create.
Add column headers – replace spaces with underscores
1. Suggested: ID, title, created, file_location, file_name, uid
2. Optional: status and language. Alternatively, you can set the defaults in your media type for status to published (1) and for language to English (en).
Change the date format to yyyy-mm-dd
Fill in cells with data (can leave uid, status, and language blank)
1. For file_location prepend the file name with: public://historical/filename.pdf. Your public file directory path will replace “public://”
2. To fill in file_location using data from column A and C, you can use this formula: =”public://historical/”&C2&”/”&A2&”.pdf”
3. If you are adding data containing multiple taxonomy terms, separate the data with a comma and a space.
Save a copy of the spreadsheet to CSV format
Upload CSV file via FTP to the new directory you created or any other readable directory.

Create Media Entities

Install modules

Install and enable the following modules:

migrate_source_csv
migrate_plus
migrate_tools
migrate_file
Views and Views UI (in core – just enable)

Edit Document Media Type

Next, edit the default document media type (optionally, you can add a new doc media type).

Go to /admin/structure/media
For Document, select Manage fields under Operations
Select Add field for each new field you want to collect info from the CSV file. The names don’t have to match up with the CSV file.

Create Configuration File

Next we will create a new migration configuration file for importing the data from the CSV file to the document media entity. Create a new file and name it single-configuration.yml.

There are 4 main sections to the file:

Definitions:
- uuid: universally unique identifier; eg: any unique #
- id: file ID; eg: document_import
- label: name of file; eg: Import documents
- migration_group: eg: default
Source – Identifies the CSV path, column names, and more
- plugin: The source plugin ID we want to use
- path: Path to your CSV file
- fields:
  - The first field (0) will be stored in the ID field during migration, and that name can be used to map the value.
  - It’s important to list fields in the same order they appear in your CSV file.
  - name – Identifies the column headers in the CSV file
  - label – Human friendly name
Process – Specifies media type and maps the data in CSV to the document media type fields
- The first part is the media type field (eg: field_year).
- The second part is the source (CSV column name; eg: year).
- Some processes rely on plugins included with the modules we enabled. These include the multi line processes such as type, field_media_document, and uid.
Destination – Instructs each row of data from the CSV file to create a document media entity

Example YML File

uuid: 1823b026-d232-11ec-9d64-0242ac120002
id: document_import
label: Import documents
migration_group: default
source:
  plugin: 'csv'
  path: 'sites/default/files/import.csv'  
  delimiter: ','
  enclosure: '"'
  header_offset: 0
  ids: [ID] 
  fields:
    0:
      name: ID
      label: 'ID'
    1:
      name: title
      label: 'Title'
    2:
      name: year
      label: 'Year'
    3:
      name: created
      label: 'Created'
    4:
      name: file_location
      label: 'File Location'
    5:
      name: file_name
      label: 'File Name'
    6:
      name: uid
      label: 'User Id'
process:
  type:
    plugin: default_value
    default_value: document
  field_doc_title: title
  field_year: year
  field_published_date: created
  field_media_document:
    plugin: file_remote_url
    source: file_location 
  name: file_name  
  uid:
    plugin: default_value
    default_value: 1
destination:
  plugin: entity:media
  default_bundle: document

Import Configuration

Now we are finally ready to import the configuration to create the media entities.

Go to /admin/config/development/configuration/single/import (Configuration > Development > Configuration Synchronization > import tab > single item link)
- Under Configuration type select Migration
- Copy/paste your yml file
- Click import, then confirm
Open command line terminal
- View the status of all migrations – drush migrate-status
  - This should show your migration file and how many if any docs have been imported.
- Run the import – drush migrate-import document_import
  - document_import is the ID from line 2 of the migration file.
- If successful, you will get a notification showing what was created or not; similar to:
  - [notice] Processed 10 items (10 created, 0 updated, 0 failed, 0 ignored) – done with ‘document_import’
Check media (/admin/content/media) to verify your documents appear there and everything was mapped correctly. If not, you can rollback and make changes:
- Rollback by running – drush migrate-rollback document_import
- Make changes to the config file and repeat steps above.
You can delete your CSV file once your import is complete.

Create View to display documents

Once the entities are created, let’s create a view for a page to display the documents on your website.

Go to /admin/structure/views (Structure > Views)
Click Add View with the following info:
- View Name: Documents
- View Settings: Show Media of type Document
- Page Settings: Create a page; Add a title and path; Display format: Table
Add fields and filters:

Add fields as shown below:

Add filters shown below:

If you want your users to be able to filter any fields, set those to exposed. It’s a good idea to include a reset button under advanced > Exposed form style > Settings.

To set a column as sortable, click on table settings, then check on sortable, then apply.

Adjust anything else as desired on the page view. Depending on your theme, you may have to edit the CSS in your theme to keep the exposed forms on same line and add a margin.

Results

Your final page should look similar to the example below. My example has a couple extra fields.

This post was written by Fawn Kildoo.

Contact us for more information on this post or our services.

Drupal 9: Importing Documents in Bulk to a Media Entity