I could use some help here...
My understanding is that an entity is a subset of a node. In other words, an entity consists of fields stored in the DB, without all of the additional overhead (and associated DB fields) of a node for its display, translation, etc. Please correct me if I am misled or incorrect.
So I am building a system wherein many nodes reference, in a one-to-many or many-to-one functionality, what are essentially entities and not necessarily nodes. In other words, I do not need to display these entities by themselves. They will be displayed by views embedded in the output of their parent nodes.
I could, of course, just make every minute data storage element a node, but something tells me that this would invoke a bunch of unnecessary overhead, not only in terms of processing, but also data storage as well.
As an example: An Item (which rightly is a node) might have, say, two or three possible "modes of fabrication," each consisting of a "method" and a "quantity per operation". I would like to have the Mode (with quantity associated with it as a field) be a database entity which also has a node reference field pointing to its parent node (the item to which it pertains). I don't need the Mode to be a node, as it only provides concise data to its parent node (the Item to which it is associated by the aforementioned node reference field).
I have installed the Entity Plus and Entity UI modules, but I cannot find a way to construct an entity. Any help is appreciated. Thanks.
—Eric
I don't know the detailed architecture of entities and nodes, and I'm not able to evaluate the technical overhead of using nodes about using custom entities. From a practical perspective, using nodes could also mean less overhead because it's much less work to build the entities itself (and some of their features in case you need them).
By the way, are you aware of the setting "Hide path display" in the "Display settings" tab of the node configuration form? In my opinion it's a great start for custom-entity-like node types.