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Custom fields type: Subfields

Introduction

This is a feature of Joomla! 4.0

Custom fields in Joomla! is a technology to extend various item types (content articles, contact items, etc.) with custom-made fields. We could e.g. extend a content article with a text field named fact_checked_by, and every content article would then get a text field where the administrator could enter a name. For a basic introduction into this topic see J3.x:Adding custom fields.

This wiki page is an introduction into a specific type of custom fields, called subfields. The type of a custom field defines it's behavior - think of the just mentioned fact_checked_by field, which is of type 'text' - you directly know what that means, it is a textfield where you can enter text, and that text is then being displayed.

The subfields type is a bit more complex; the aim of it is to provide the user the possibility to create a repeatable custom field for an item with multiple related fields. That sounds more complex than it is. It basically means: A subfields field is a custom field which can contain an arbitrary amount of other fields, forming a repeatable list. For instance: Adding a subfields custom field with the name ingredients and the subfields description (text) and amount (integer) to a content article. What do we have then? We have an article which can contain a list of descriptions and amounts. What is that? Correct, e.g. a list of ingredients - so we basically added information to our article that allows is to interpret it, for example, as a recipe.

A very short note on terminology, just for people who take it very accurate: As you might have noticed, we use the term "subfields" to describe two different things: First, subfields is the type of a custom field that is being added to an item, so the type of the top-level "parent field" - so like other custom fields can be of type text or integer, we use the term subfields to describe the type of a custom field. But, second, we also call the configured "child fields" of this parent field subfields, just because that is comfortable: We have a parent field which contains child fields, so calling those child fields subfields is handy. This maybe can get confusing, but we think it should always be clear what is being meant due to context. If that shouldn't be the case anywhere, we try to use different terms (like above, when we spoke of parent and child fields). Additionally, we will always write the type as subfields while when talking about the child fields, we will just call them subfields. This is just a note for very attentive readers, and most of the people who are reading this should not care about this.

Adding a Custom Field to be Used as a Subfield

Before creating a new subfields instance you must create one or more normal custom fields that serve as child fields for that subfields instance. So, for example, when you want to add a repeatable subfields instance called ingredients to an article with the subfields description (type text) and amount (type integer), you have to first create the two custom fields description and amount as separate, own custom fields.

Note about subfields-only fields: By default, a newly-created custom field will have its Category assignment set to All. This means that this custom field will be used for all items of all categories of the relevant context (e.g. content articles). When you integrate such a custom field into a subfields instance, you basically will see the subfield twice when editing an item: One time as a standalone field as part of that item, and the other time included into the subfields instance as a subfield. You can circumvent this problem by declaring the subfield to be not available for an item directly: To do this, simply set the Category of that subfield to None. By doing this, this custom field will not be part of any item itself, being only part of the subfields instance.

The subfields Field

Provides a possibility to add several (repeatable) subfields to an item. The subfields are each rendered by themselves and the result will by default be shown as a comma-separated list (this can be changed, see further down).

The subfields Specific Options

  • Repeatable, repeat (mandatory) Boolean, default true.

Whether the subfields should be repeatable, i.e. allowing multiple lines of values.

  • subfields (mandatory)

A list of other custom field items that shall be used as subfields for this item.

Render values, render_values (mandatory) Boolean, default true. Whether the value of this subfield shall get rendered or not (see next chapter).

Disable Rendering for a Subfield

When creating a subfields instance and selecting, which other custom fields should be used as subfields, you are able to select whether you want Joomla! to render this subfields' value, when the value of the parent field is being rendered. Normally, this is what you want to do. That's why the default value is true.

Turning this off will have consequences for subfield types for which the value, which is saved in the database, is not equal to the rendered string which is normally being used in the Frontend: E.g. the media type stores a path to a media file in the database, but normally renders as an

-tag. Turning this option off would mean that the default rendering process of the subfield will now show the path the file instead of the

-tag.

So, why does this option exist? Because rendering of multiple fields, maybe multiple hundreds of fields, costs performance, and rendering of many subfields of many items takes much performance and time. And this is not always what you want, nor what you need: You are able to switch this option off and create your own rendering procedure by creating a layout override for your subfields (see next chapter), so this will render the subfields exactly as you want it, and you can disable the Joomla! default rendering with it.

Changing the Rendering with a Layout Override

By default, the value of all individual subfields will be rendered and the result will be shown as a comma-separated list in the Frontend. This default behavior is implemented in the file plugins/fields/subfields/tmpl/subfields.php, please take a look at it to get a first impression on how to change the rendering in general.

The first thing to do to change the rendering is to create a layout override for that template, e.g. by creating a new file templates/$YOUR_TEMPLATE/html/plg_fields_subfields/subfields.php, see Layout Overrides in Joomla for further info.

The next thing to do is to get an idea about the structure of the $field object that is being passed to the template. That object has 2 important properties:

  • $field->name is a string containing the name of the custom field.
  • $field->subfields_rows is an array containing arrays, which contain the subfields. So, basically, $field->subfields_rows contains rows of data, and each row contains a list of subfield instances/objects. Each of those instances is a fully-featured field instance/object itself, and has properties such as name, type, etc. along with value and rawvalue, containing the rendered and unrendered value respectively.

You can use the name property of $field to make distinctions in your template, dependent on which subfields instance is being rendered.

The subfields_rows property might sound a bit complicated in the first place, but when you create your own layout override and play around with it, look at different states (e.g. by using a debugger, or var_dump()) etc., you should get a good feeling about how it behaves very quickly.

Example 1

Suppose we have created a subfields instance named ingredients for an article, that contains the subfields description and image of type text and media respectively. We now want to display those in a nice way when we are asked to render them. We could do this in the following way. Note the different use of rawvalue and value here, which we use to get access to the rendered value of the media field (which is, normally, an

HTML tag):

name == 'ingredients'): ?>
  
    subfields_rows as $row): ?>
      
        Description: rawvalue); ?>

        Image: value; ?>
      
    
  

Additionally, you could disable the rendering of the description subfield in this example (because the rendered value is not being used, only the raw value), see also previous chapter.

Example 2

The subfields_rows object can get a little complicated. The following code will render all subfields in a comma-separated list, using their rawvalue and prefixing them with their name. This example shows how the subfield_rows object can be used on a more basic-level, not using any rendered values.

subfields_rows as $row)
{
  echo '';
  $buffer = array();
  foreach ($row as $subfield)
  {
    $buffer[] = (
      $subfield->name . ': '
      . $subfield->rawvalue
    );
  }
  echo implode(', ', $buffer);
  echo '';
}
echo '';