Referencing fields

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

When creating a form for a dialog's tab, 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 the user hits the form's submit button.

Fields are defined 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 create the following configuration:

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

Using the fieldType property and short field names

For legibility, ease of development, and to make field names easier to remember, with Magnolia 5.7 we've introduced the fieldType property.

• For the fieldType property you no longer need to specify the field type using a fully qualified class name. Just provide the field's name as the value of the fieldType property.
  If your project uses the class property in too many places, you can still continue using class. The feature is backwards compatible.
• We have streamlined the definition names by making them shorter. The Short field names list below on this page shows which fields are affected.

Applied to the above example the configuration can now be as simple as this:

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

To verify that you use correct short field names, look in the   Definitions app :

Relevance for custom fields extending or decorating Magnolia fields

Please note that the new short field naming affects:

• The origin of the definition. The fields defined previously as JCR nodes under /modules/<module-name>/fieldTypes folders are now defined from YAML files.
  See the following example showing the definition of damUploadField in Magnolia 5.6.6 and the corresponding damUpload definition in Magnolia 5.7:
  
  
  
  
• The file names. If a field was previously defined in a YAML file, the file's name has changed to the new short name. See for example the definition of the Expanding text field:
  

  /content-editor/fieldTypes/expandingTextField.yaml (in Magnolia 5.6.6)
  /content-editor/fieldTypes/expandingText.yaml (in Magnolia 5.7)

Short field names