The External Entities module, presented by its maintainer Valentin Guignon at Drupalcamp Perpignan, enables you to manipulate external data as Drupal entities, without the need to import them into the database beforehand. We will present two practical cases.
First, in the field of agronomy or biology, the Florilège portal aims at facilitating the exchange of accessions (biological material: seeds, plants, cell culture) provided by various BRCs (biological resource centers). These accessions are not stored in the database, but declared in Drupal as external entities, that we retrieve in this case via the BrAPI REST protocol. Once interfaced with the relevant module (we will see how), these entities can be used as you usually do: for instance you may index them or customize their display. We will briefly mention the GBIF module, which demonstrates how to interface with this repository of biodiversity-related data.
Next, we will see how to put this concept into practice, this time with a catalogue of archeological artefacts.
We will discuss in detail key concepts, how to open up your data, and what benefits a massive adoption would bring to the community.
