Referencing fields

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

When creating a form tab in a dialog, you usually want it to contain some fields. The fields are the core building blocks of the form's functionality for user tasks such as entering a text and sending it to a server after hitting the form's submit button. Definition of fields in a dialog is done using 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 field was to state its fully qualified class name. For example, to create a simple text field named title in a dialog's tab called tabText you had to include the following code in the configuration of the dialog:

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

Using the fieldType property and with short field names

For legibility, ease of development, and to make field names easier to remember, Magnolia 5.7 changed this in two ways:

• You no longer need to specify the field type using the fully qualified class name. You need to set just the field name proper via the fieldType property.
• In selected modules (see the Short field names list below on this page), the field name does not even require the -Field or -FieldDefiniton suffix. 

For the example with the text field this means that the configuration can look like as this:

form:
  tabs:
    - name: tabText
      fields:
        - name: title
          fieldType: text

To check you use correct field alias names, look in the Definitions app:

TODO

Short field names