Entites are the base of Drupal content and it's impossible to think about a web application without the use of entities. Also, it is very likely that you will need to connect to an external service and which is already providing content you can use in your web application. The most common approach in these cases is to perform a content migration (usually through Migrate and Feeds modules), but if the external service already provide a RESTful web service or a complete API which allow us to query the data we need when we need we might not even need to migrate.

In this session I want to explore the options we have in Drupal 8 regarding implementing entities to wrap around external data instead of migrating them and store them locally. The main challenge here is that Drupal modules tend to assume that entities have a local base table, but for external data we might not need to have a local table since we can grab the data directly from an API. I will show some strategies I have used for other projects to work around that.

These are the following topics that I propose to cover.

• Motivation and Benefits
• Working around database storage
• Implementing Entity and Controller classes
• Querying the content
• Caching data
• External Fields
• Using nodes as wrappers