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Adding entities to services

What are entities?

Entities are a "optional" resource in EventCatalog. You can learn more reading our entities guide.

Added in eventcatalog@2.36.0

Once you have created your entities you can add them to your services.

To add an entity to a service you need to add the entity to the entities array in the service's markdown file.

/services/PaymentService/index.mdx

---
id: PaymentService
name: PaymentService
version: 1.0.0
# This assumes you have an entity called Payment
entities:
  - id: Payment
    # Optional, if not provided the latest version will be used
    version: 1.0.0
---

Your service markdown...

Visualize entity relationships​

Added in eventcatalog@3.25.1

When a service has entities assigned, EventCatalog generates a dedicated Entity Map page in the visualizer at /visualiser/services/{id}/{version}/entity-map. A link to this view appears automatically in the service sidebar under the visualizer section.

The entity map shows each entity as a node and draws edges between entities that reference one another using the references field in their properties. This gives you a quick overview of how the domain model is structured inside a service.

To learn how to define relationships between entities, see the entity map guide.