Remove Dynamic Entity Reference (DER) dependency

I'm setting to Needs Review because I did a very rough WIP for an idea on how we could do this.

The gist of the idea:
Instead of storing the entity_id field as a DER, just store an internal link and derive the entity data from loading the internal path (kind of like the menu_link_content module in core does)

That way even if the entity has been deleted we would have a reference to where it came from.

Does this idea gel with the maintainers?

The failures are expected BTW, I just need some confirmation on the approach before I tackle those.

I am very open and positive to this. The implementation details can be tweaked too I guess, but I can't see why this would not cover at least most of the usecases. One aspect that I do not know if works or not is if an entity type does not actually have a canonical URL. Is that possible or common? If I created a custom entity type , could I opt to not have it have a canonical URL?

First of all @joelpittet’s thank you to move forward on this.

I currently have no time to review because of customer projects. But in one project I will soon create at least one entity type which don't need a canonical route definition. This makes sense when if an entity is just for storing data or its managed via other entities. A good example is the paragraph module and its entity type. Currently there is no "links" section defined.

I guess for the paragraphs module (and others like it, storage → module for example).

You'd probably want the host entity URL anyway, right? Currently the URL is shown (when possible) on the report page.

Sure but I was referring to being able to load (or save for that matter) the entity you want to check from the URL 🤓

joseph.olstad → made their first commit to this issue’s fork.