Netlify-cms: Nested field access in name

[robinvdvleuten]

It would be very nice to have the possibility to have nested fields access in field names.

Currently when I am configuring a nested field like this;

files:
      - file: 'site/content/_index.md'
        name: sections
        label: 'Sections'
        fields:
          - name: about
            label: 'About'
            widget: object
            fields:
              - { name: title, label: 'Title', widget: string }
              - { name: body, label: 'Body', widget: markdown }

It gives me the following;

-section-----
|--about----|
|----title--|
|----body---|
-------------

But if would be nice if I can just do this;

files:
      - file: 'site/content/_index.md'
        name: about
        label: 'About'
        fields:
         - { name: 'about.title', label: 'Title', widget: string }
         - { name: 'about.body', label: 'Body', widget: markdown }

And having this output;

-about-------
|--title----|
|--body-----|
-------------

[erquhart]

Providing more control over the data model makes sense, agreed. Just need to figure out how the api should work, I think we can do better than dot notation (but maybe not?).

[01ivr3]

If I understand this correctly, adding this feature could help clean up the editor experience quite a lot.

Say I have the following front matter on some Hugo pages.

menu:
  main:
    weight: '1'

Setting this one integer value per page will determine both the sort order and whether the page is included in Hugo's built-in nav system. Hugo will take care of the rest using the page title as the default label for each entry and auto-generating the relative links.

Now someone please correct me if I am wrong, but to make this one field editable in NetlifyCMS, I believe I need something like the following in config.yml:

- label: "Menu"
  name: "menu"
  widget: "object"
  fields:
    - label: "Main"
      name: "main"
      widget: "object"
      fields:
        - {label: "Weight", name: "weight", widget: "number"}

This will yield a three layer deep nested object UI in NetlifyCMS to edit one single field, which will also look about as hideous as it sounds.

[randallmlough]

+1 for this issue. Not being able to nest fields is a big UI / UX issue in my opinion.

[erquhart]

Man, just had to get a simple value nested a couple levels deep for the docs site and yeah, this is pretty silly.

[robinvdvleuten]

And it should be quite easy to implement with a library like https://github.com/developit/dlv or https://github.com/robinvdvleuten/shvl.

[erquhart]

We're already including Lodash, so I'd expect we go with _.toPath. The challenge is in the details, e.g. collisions and validation.

[randallmlough]

@erquhart is this something we could have a fix for in 2.0? I know the status of this is "accepted"and I saw there's a some open projects to rework the API, but didn't see something that explicitly mentions this type of functionality.

[erquhart]

If someone wants to take it on, we're open to a PR. We'd need to map when writing and also reverse map when reading, and ensure graceful handling of collisions. That said, I'd say this is ready for development.

[stale[bot]]

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