Entity Usage

This module provides a tool to track entity relationships in Drupal.

When do I need this module?

You may find this module useful if you want to:

• Know the usage of nodes, media or taxonomy terms
• Display usage / references of your content in general
• Have a mechanism to prevent deletion of content (any entity) that is referenced by other piece of content

Supported relationships

Currently the following tracking methods are supported:

• Entities related through entity_reference fields
• Entities related through link fields
• Standard HTML links inside text fields (when pointing to an entity URL).
• Entities embedded into text fields using the Entity Embed or LinkIt modules
• Entities related through fields provided by the Block Field,
  Entity Reference Revisions, and Dynamic Entity Reference modules
• Entities related through Layout Builder. Supported methods: Core's inline
  (non-reusable) content blocks, and entities selected through the contributed
  Entity Browser Block module.

How it works

A relationship between two entities is considered so when a source entity points to a target entity through one of the methods described above.

You can configure the entity types to be tracked as a source, and what entity types should be tracked as target. By default all content entities (except files and users) are tracked as source.

You can also configure what plugins (from the tracking methods indicated above) should be active. By default all plugins are active.

When a source entity is created / updated / deleted, all active plugins are called to register potential relationships.

Content entities can have a local task link (Tab) on its canonical page linking to a "Usage" information page, where users can see where that entity is being used. You can configure which entity types should have a local task displaying usage information. By default no tabs are shown.

In order to configure these and other settings, navigate to "Configuration -> Content Authoring -> Entity Usage Settings" (or go to the URL /admin/config/entity-usage/settings).

Known limitations

Plugins track one usage per entity per field

The module will register only one usage of the same target entity per field. This is intentional in the current implementation, please open an issue if you have a use-case where this is a problem.

Only tested with MySQL

This module has only been tested with MySQL databases, if you experience issues in other platforms please file an issue describing the problem in the issue queue.