Entity Dependency Visualizer draws the entity reference graph of any Drupal node, taxonomy term or user, so you can see at a glance what a piece of content actually pulls in — the paragraphs, media, files, taxonomy terms and other nodes hanging off it, and how deep the chain goes.

Nodes, taxonomy terms and users each get an Entity dependencies local task, which renders an interactive Graphviz diagram you can pan and zoom, colour coded by entity type, with every arrow labelled with the field that creates the reference. Click any shape to jump to that entity's own dependency graph.

What do people use it for?

Work out what will break before you delete something

See every entity that depends on the one you are about to delete or unpublish, before you do it.

Find the entity that is actually rendering a page

Follow a page down through its paragraphs, media and referenced nodes until you reach the one holding the content you are looking for.

Spot circular references

Entities that reference each other in a loop show up immediately as a cycle in the graph, so you can untangle them instead of chasing the symptoms.

Audit content before a migration or a content sync

Understand the real shape of a content model before moving it, syncing it between environments, or handing it to someone else.

Explain a tangled content model to somebody else

A picture of the reference graph settles an architecture conversation faster than a description of it.

What does the graph show you?

Each shape is one entity, coloured by entity type — nodes, taxonomy terms, users, files and paragraphs each get their own colour. Each arrow is one reference, and its label can show the field name, the bundle, the entity ID and the order the reference was found in.

You choose what is printed inside each shape: the entity's label, its ID, or its UUID. Labels are the friendliest starting point and long ones are shortened with an ellipsis.

Interactive

Pan and zoom around the diagram with the mouse or the controls in the bottom right, and click straight through any shape to open that entity's own dependency graph. Because the labels are rendered as real SVG text and not as an image, your browser's own find (Ctrl+F / Cmd+F) searches inside the graph.

Exportable

Turn on Show Graphviz object in the settings and the page also prints the Graphviz source behind the diagram, ready to copy for offline analysis, for a report, or to refine by hand in any Graphviz tool.

Built for large content models

Nesting is capped at 100 levels, and once a graph passes 1000 entities it is automatically reduced to two levels with a message telling you so. That keeps the browser responsive and avoids timeouts and heavy server load on big sites — you drill down by clicking through, rather than waiting for everything at once. You can also cut the noise by listing reference fields to ignore on the settings page.

How do I use it?

Install and enable the module.
Grant the Use entity dependencies permission to the roles that need it. It is a restricted permission, because the graph shows the labels and IDs of referenced entities regardless of whether the viewer can see each one individually. If the tab does not appear, this is almost always why.
View any node, taxonomy term or user and open Entity dependencies. On a site without core's Navigation module that is a tab in the usual row next to View and Edit. With Navigation enabled — which the standard profile does on recent core — local tasks move into the top bar: Edit gets its own button and everything else, including Entity dependencies, sits behind the … (“More actions”) button next to it. /node/1/entity_dependencies always works directly.
Pan, zoom, and click any shape to drill into its own dependencies.
Tune the diagram at Configuration › Development › Entity Dependency Visualizer — direction, size, fonts, shapes, what the arrow labels show, and what is printed inside each shape.

Which entities and fields are followed?

Tabs are added to nodes, taxonomy terms and users. The graph follows entity_reference, entity_reference_revisions, image and file fields, so referenced paragraphs, media and files all appear in it.

Reference walking is a plugin, so it can be swapped. The built-in Native calculator needs nothing extra. An optional submodule delegates to Dependency Calculation (depcalc) instead — the same engine Acquia Content Hub uses — which you enable manually if you want it.

Requirements

The 8.x-1.x branch supports Drupal 10.2, 11 and 12 and requires no other modules.

The 7.x-1.x branch supports Drupal 7, requires the Entity Dependency API, and shows an Entity graph tab instead.

The diagram is drawn in the browser by viz.js, a build of Graphviz, together with svg-pan-zoom, both loaded from the jsDelivr CDN.

Troubleshooting

I cannot find the Entity dependencies link. Two usual causes. Either the account is missing the Use entity dependencies permission, or the site has core's Navigation module enabled and the link has moved into the … menu in the top bar. After granting the permission, rebuild caches — local tasks are routes, and routes are cached. There is no link on /admin/content: the graph belongs to a single entity, so it hangs off that entity's own page.

The graph area is empty. The diagram is rendered in the browser, so it needs JavaScript enabled and access to cdn.jsdelivr.net.

Errors after updating. Uninstall the module, update the code, then reinstall.

Issues and merge requests are welcome.

Entity Dependency Visualizer