This module allow you to connect to datasets from external databases and use it in your Drupal 8 website. While content lives external, Drupal sees those remote entities as internal. This makes it possible to alter the field displays, add references, comments, pathaliases, share buttons, webshop products and more.

External data

You can use within your website museum collections, content of Wikipedia, external specialised thesauri for wildlife, streetnames, members, and other systems in use within an organisation. If the back-end supports updating as well, you can even create, edit and delete remote entities, making Drupal a central hub for content in an organisation.

Plugins

Background

Drupal 8 is built database agnostic. It should not matter for Drupal anymore if data for an entity is coming from the internal SQL-database, an external json file or anything else.

Technique

The module provides an option to define an external entity type per endpoint and mapping for each field. Currently the module is using a REST back-end (more back-end types can be added since they are just plugins).

Known limitations

Drupal and this module assumes all fields of an entity are coming from the same dataset. All fields within that entity type reads the data from the defined source and writes data to that source. You can add fields, but they only become filled when they are mapped to a field in the datasource or autofilled. To deal with this, this module provides 'annotations' connected to an entity where you can define your own fields.

Supporting organizations: 
coding and sponsoring
testing and sponsoring
coding and sponsoring

Project information

Releases