Outline Entity

The Outline Entity module provides an interface for organizing entities in a hierarchy. Essentially a Book replacement module, it is similar to the Book module, except it allows a reference to any entity type to be placed on the outline, whereas the Book module permits only the organizing of Book nodes.

This module was created by taking the core Taxonomy module and modifying the code, such that a vocabulary is an outline, and a taxonomy term is an outline entry. Outline entry's differ from taxonomy terms in that they can not have user defined fields, but rather have an "Attached Entities" field that contains one or more entity references.

Eventually it may be possible to include all of the functionality of both the Book and Taxonomy modules in this module, which may eliminate some inefficiencies, as both modules are similar.

The ability to organize any entity in an outline format has several potential use cases:

1) Creation of more sophisticated Books, in that the content creators are not limited to having just nodes in the book. Automatic PDF generation could be provided, or some other means, of reading the book off-line.

2) The introduction of drag and drop capability using jQuery tree controls, e.g. https://www.jstree.com.

3) The ability to auto-generate outlines representing the content available on a site. For example, a wizard could be created that auto-generates an outline that shows the instances of a particular entity type displayed by update date, create date, alphabetically, and by author. Or, a wizard could auto-generate an outline of all configuration entities present on a site.

4) An Outline entry could represent a Drupal View, with child outline entries automatically created for each display.

5) The ability to pre-load children to provide a very fast interface. For example, if an outline is created where each Outline Entry represents a Physician, and child outline entries for Physician Assistants (PAs) are created, then clicking on a Physician would automatically pre-load that Physician's PA's. This would make browsing a site's content very fast, as most entities would be pre-loaded before the user goes to view/edit and entity.

6) The creation of purely textual representations of content, useful for increased accessibility for the blind, or accessing site content on a slow connection.