Referencing fields

This page describes two ways in which you may define the type of a field in a dialog.

Defining fields

When creating a dialog, you usually want it to contain fields that build its core functionality for user tasks such entering a text into a field and sending it to the server upon hitting the SUBMIT button. Any field like that must be defined in a dialog definition through a field definition which must contain – at minimum – a property telling Magnolia what type of field it should render in the dialog.

Using the class property

Until the release of Magnolia 5.7, the only way to specify the type of a dialog field was to state a fully qualified class name. For example, to define a simple text field named title for a dialog's tab called tabText you had to include the following in your code:

form:
  tabs:
    - name: tabText
      fields:
        - name: title
          class: info.magnolia.ui.form.field.definition.TextFieldDefinition

Currently in a dialog definition, to specify the type of field you must supply a fully qualified class name of the field, for example:

to provide a fully qualified

class or a fieldType  

The definition by class is the traditional (older) way, very well known to Java developers. The definition by fieldType has been implemented in Magnolia with the release of the 5.7 branch and is oriented towards front-end developers who may have only very little or no knowledge of Java.

Examples

Short field names