Entity Dependency API

This module provides an API to define dependencies between entities, and also a useful iterator class.

Background

This project originated from the Deploy module, where it's used heavily, but were later separated out for better code separation and reusability between modules.

The iterator

You construct the iterator with an array of entity IDs. Then, when iterating over the iterator you will get all entities AND their dependencies out in a sane order (i.e. dependencies first).

Since the iterator only return "plain" entity objects and developers often need more meta data around the entity (primarily the entity type) we are embedding metadata within the entity object according to the OData protocol's JSON format which is a very simple and lightweight way of solving the problem.