Devel Generate fails to create proper referenced entities
Issue #3074686 on drupal.org by James Marks.
On a new Drupal instance (Drupal 8.7.6) with only the Devel Generate module added/enabled, I encountered the following issues:
The Article content type has a default entity reference field that references tags. When Devel 'generate content' is used to generate Article nodes, Devel creates terms with unusually long term names (up to 150+ character strings).
When an entity reference field that references the Page content type is added to the Article content type (Article -> Page) and Devel 'generate content' is used to generate Article nodes, Devel creates referenced Page nodes that, in some cases, appear to have no title value in the content list (although there is a title in the database). Attempts to edit these nodes results in a white screen with the text 'The website encountered an unexpected error. Please try again later.' The database log has PHP errors 'InvalidArgumentException: The timestamp must be numeric.' Other referenced Page nodes have unusually long single-word titles similar to the aforementioned taxonomy terms.
When a second entity reference field that references the Article content type is added to the Page content type (Article <- Page) and Devel 'generate content' is used to generate Article nodes, Devel creates both Article and Page nodes that appear to have no title in the content list (although there is a title in the database) and attempts to edit these nodes results in the previously described white screen with the error message. Other referenced Article and Page nodes have unusually long single-word titles similar to the aforementioned taxonomy terms.
It appears to be only the created referenced entities that have these problems. The original created entities appear to be created without problems.
This issue came up when I ran Devel generate content on a site with multiple content types each of which had entity reference fields to every other content type. In that case, running Devel generate content consumed all available memory and resulted in a fatal error.