Module and theme fields overview
Within modules and themes, fields are used to enable content creators to control module and theme styling and functionality on your website. When developing a module or a theme, you'll include fields in a fields.json
file, which will then translate to the theme and content editors.
Below, learn more about how to create and manage options for module and theme fields. To learn more about specific field types, check out the module and field types reference guide.
You can add fields to a module's fields.json
file locally through the HubSpot CLI and in the in-app module editor. To add fields to a theme, you must update the theme's fields.json
file locally using the CLI.
When building locally, module and theme fields can be edited through a fields.json
file inside of the module or theme's folder. For modules, this file will automatically be created when using the hs create module
command. All of the field options available in the module editor are available as properties you can add or edit in the fields.json
file. This includes repeater fields, groups, and conditions. One of the benefits of editing locally is that it makes it easier to include your modules in version control systems like git.
The design manager has a built-in module editor UI that enables you to create, group, and edit module fields. The module editor contains a module preview which enables you to see what the module looks like on its own, as well as test your fields. Since modules do not live in a vacuum you should always test them on a template you plan to use, to see what template level styles may affect it. Be aware if a module is contained in a locked folder it cannot be edited this way.
Please note: if you are working mostly locally but want to use the module editor to configure fields, make sure to fetch your changes. This is especially important for those using version control systems like git.
By default, module fields in content editors stack vertically. However, you can place module fields side by side by adding a display_width
property to fields in the fields.json
file with a value of half_width
.
A single field with a display_width
of half_width
will appear as half-width in the content editor. When the field above or below that field in the fields.json
file is set to half_width
, they'll be placed side by side.
When fields are related to each other often it makes sense for them to be displayed visually grouped. Modules and Themes support grouping multiple fields together.
Field groups without nested field groups display simply with dividers above and below the group, and the group's label is displayed at the top of the group.
Field Groups can be nested three levels deep. A field group that contains another field group will display as a button. Clicking the button to view the group will show the contents of that group.
Field group objects can be listed as children of other field groups, their structure is very similar to field's themselves with the only special parameter being the "children" parameter, which is an array of fields and groups they contain.
Field groups can be set to be expanded by default by setting the expanded
boolean property to true
in the fields.json
group properties as shown in the example code above. Field groups are not expanded by default and when using nested field groups, the parent group cannot make use of this property.
Field groups create dicts that contain the field values you want to output. If you nest field groups the nested field group is a dict inside of the outside field group dict. To access that data you will traverse the tree from either the root theme or module variable depending on your context.
For situations where a field group is repeated, you can specify one or more of those occurrences as featured, enabling you to style the item separately to make it stand out. For example, this can be particularly useful for a product page where you might have a featured product that you want to highlight.
You can specify a maximum number of featured items per field group. In the editor, content creators can then mark items as featured as needed.
To enable featured items in a field group, include the group_occurrence_meta
property in the field group configuration. This property stores the following properties:
featured_enabled
: set totrue
to enable featured items.featured_limit
: the maximum number of featured items to allow.
The field group must also include the occurrence
property.
To check whether an item in a repeated group is featured, you can query the hs_meta
property. The code below uses a for loop to check for field group items that are set to featured, then displays the title of each as an h3
header.
Style fields are a special field group type in a module or theme's fields.json
file that give content creators control over a module or theme's styling in the page and theme editor. Below, learn how to add style fields to a module or theme. Learn about best practices for using and organizing style fields.
Module style fields
Style fields added to a module will appear on the Styles tab of the page editor when editing the module:
When adding style fields to a module's fields.json
file, you add them within one styles group. That group, however, can contain multiple groups within it, as shown below:
The following fields can be used as style fields in modules. Learn about each of the field types in the module and field types guide.
- Alignment
- Gradient
- Spacing
- Background Image
- Border
- Boolean
- Choice
- Number
- Color
- Icon
- Image
- Font
- Text Alignment
Learn more about module and theme field types.
View the CMS boilerplate for an example of a style fields within a module's fields.json
file.
Theme style fields
Style fields added to a theme will appear in the left sidebar of the theme editor:
All style fields within a theme's fields.json
file will be added to the left sidebar of the theme editor, as opposed to needing to put them under a styles group, as shown below:
The following fields can be used as style fields in themes. Learn about each of the field types in the module and field types guide.
Learn more about module and theme field types.
View the CMS boilerplate for an example of a style fields within a theme's fields.json
file.
Please note: if you're a marketplace provider, you should not replace existing content fields with style fields in existing modules. Changing the hierarchy of fields in a fields.json
file can result in existing module instances losing their data. Instead, you should add new style fields, or create a new listing that has the fields appropriately grouped. This will prevent your updates from being breaking changes for customers relying on your themes. To advocate for migration paths for old modules, check out the HubSpot Ideas forum.
Some style fields provide a way to output css directly based on the field's value. This is especially helpful with fields that can control more complicated styling like gradients. The following style fields have a generated .css
property:
When creating modules that format information, often there are types of information that repeat. A recipe module for example, might have a field for "Ingredient". Well, most recipes have more than 1 ingredient. You could give them a rich text field, but then you lose your ability to force consistent styling and add functionality around each ingredient. That's where repeaters come in, HubSpot has two forms of repeaters: Repeating fields, and Repeating groups.
Repeating fields are normal fields but content creators can add, remove, and re-arrange instances of the field. Using the recipe module example above, each ingredient could be a repeating text field.
This makes it so the content creator can add as many ingredients as they wish. From the developer perspective, you get an array that you can loop through to print out that list of ingredients, applying the formatting and functionality you want.
Repeating fields are best used for very simple situations. Often times repeating groups make more sense.
Please note: it's not currently possible to set the default order of repeating fields.
Repeating groups are field groups with the repeating option enabled. Repeating groups allow content creators to add, remove, and re-arrange groups of fields. Using the recipe module example, say that you want to integrate your ingredients list with a shopping list functionality.
The quantity of an ingredient would be critical to the shopping list. While someone could provide that in the text field, the module would then need to parse the text field and hope we are successfully separating the quantity from the ingredient. This is where repeating groups come in handy. The output of these fields is an object that can be looped through.
To make the editing experience better and prevent content editors from providing values that you have not programmatically accommodated for, we allow you to set minimum and maximum values for how many items content creators can add to a repeating field or repeating group.
For repeating groups you can also set which field acts as the label for that item when viewing the repeater.
Parameter | Type | Description | Default |
---|---|---|---|
max
| Integer | Maximum number of occurrences of this group. Prevents the content creator from adding more than this number of items in the UI. |
null
|
min
| Integer | Minimum number of occurrences of this field group. Prevents users from having less than this number of items in the UI. |
null
|
sorting_label_field
| String | This is the field id, of the field to pull text from to show in the UI on the draggable cards. The default for this is the first field in the group. |
The inherited_value
property can be configured to make a field inherit its default value from other fields. To set a field's entire default value from another field's value, set the default_value_path
to the field name path of the target field. When default_value_path
is set, it'll ignore any default
set on the field.
To access values from other fields, the paths must include module.
at the beginning, similar to when accessing the value in the module's HubL code.
font
and font_set
, you must include both for font field inheritance. Learn more about the font field.
For complex fields (fields whose values are objects), users can have more granularity over which properties get inherited through property_value_path
. Any paths referred in inherited_value
can also include keys from a field's value for complex fields.
For example, color fields have object values that contain the color itself as well as opacity. So to get a color's actual color value without the opacity, the path would end in .color
. For example, a font field can inherit just its color from a separate color field:
You can also combine the effects of default_value_path
and property_value_paths
to inherit a default value from one field while inheriting a specific property value from a different field:
If a field inherits from another field but then gets directly overridden at the page level or in theme settings, its connection to the controlling field gets severed. Any other fields attached via default_value_path
or property_value_paths
will no longer affect the value of the field.
When defining custom module and theme fields, you can configure when a field appears by adding the visibility
object to the field in the fields.json
file. For example, you can set a form module to display a rich text area when the thank you message is selected, but a page selector when a redirect is selected.
You can set visibility based on the value of a controlling_field_path
, or based on a specific property within that field using the property
parameter.
You can also apply visibility to an individual field, or to a group of fields to control visibility for all elements in the group.
Parameter | Type | Description |
---|---|---|
controlling_field_path
| String | The doth path of the field that controls the display condition.
|
controlling_value_regex
| String | The regular expression in the controlling field that needs to be present for the field to display. The regex must match the entire string (not a subset) and is run case-sensitively. |
operator
| String | The operator that defines how the
|
property
| String | Sets visibility based on a specific property of the target field. For example, you can enable visibility when an image field's |
The visibility attribute can support only one criteria at a time. To include multiple criteria with multiple operators, as well as order of operations, you can use advanced_visibility
.
Parameter | Type | Description |
---|---|---|
visibility_rules
| String | By default, this value is set to |
boolean_operator
| String | The boolean operator for the conditional criteria. Can be |
criteria
| Array | An array of visibility objects that defines the conditional criteria that needs to be met for the field to display. |
controlling_field_path
| String | The dot path of the field that controls the display condition.
|
controlling_value_regex
| String | The value in the controlling field that needs to be met to display the field. When using the A field with a |
operator
| String | The operator that defines how the
Regex syntax is required when using |
As an example, below is the first portion of code from the default payments module. To review the full code, you can clone the module in HubSpot, then download into your local environment to view the module's fields.json
file.
The above code results in the following behavior:
- The first field (
payment
) is a required field (dropdown menu) that lets the content creator select a specific payment link. In HubSpot, a content creator will see the following when first adding the module to the page:
- Once a payment link is selected, the three fields that follow (
checkout_location
,button_text
, andicon
) will appear. This is because the fields have avisibility
attribute which is controlled by thepayment
field and requires an ID value in the payment field'sid
parameter.
The icon
field itself uses advanced_visibility
to appear only when there's a payment link present in the payment
field AND when the add_icon
checkbox is selected.
In addition to setting visibility within fields.json
, You can also set visibility in the design manager by editing a field's Display conditions options.
After setting visibility in the design manager, you can fetch the module using the CLI to view the visibility
attribute in the module's fields.json
file.
You can add conditions to a field to prevent editing when the specified conditions are met. You can also set a message to display above the field when disabled to provide context in the content editor.
The conditions and message are set in the field's disabled_controls
object. The conditions for making a field editable are set within the rules
object, which follows the same format as advanced_visibility.
The code below shows both a simple and advanced implementation of rules
criteria:
- The
simple_page
field includes logic to disable the field if thetext_field
is set totesting
. - The
fancy_page
field includes logic to disable the field if eithertext_field
ortext_field_2
is set to any value not equal totesting
andtesting2
respectively.
Parameter | Type | Description |
---|---|---|
message
| String | The message to display in the content editor when the field is disabled. |
rules
| Object | The conditions for enabling the field for editing. |
criteria
| Array | An array of condition objects that defines the criteria that needs to be met for the field to display. This array can contain multiple condition objects separated by |
boolean_operator
| String | The boolean operator for the conditional criteria. Can be |
controlling_field_path
| String | The dot path of the field that controls the display condition.
|
controlling_value_regex
| String | The value in the controlling field that needs to be met to display the field. When using the A field with a |
operator
| String | The operator that defines how the
Regex syntax is required when using |
When in the theme editor, preview highlighting can help content creators understand which fields are controlling which page elements. Preview highlighting works by mapping the theme fields to the CSS selectors that they affect, adding a box around those elements when hovering over the field in the theme editor.
To configure preview highlighting for theme fields, you'll include an editor-preview.json
file in the root directory of the theme to map theme fields to a list of CSS selectors. In the file, you'll include an array for each style field you want to highlight containing the relevant CSS selectors, using the following format:
For example, the code below will highlight which page elements are controlled by the primary font field. You can view the full example in the editor-preview.json
file of the default Growth theme.
To get started generating this file, run the following CLI command to create the file. During file creation, a script will run to set up the initial field-selectors mappings.
Parameter | Description |
---|---|
theme-directory-path
| The path to the theme directory. |
After running the command, you'll need to review and refine the editor-preview.json
file to ensure that fields and selectors are mapped properly. While the generate-selectors command will make a rudimentary guess about which fields affect which selectors, you'll need to make corrections based on how your theme is built. For example, this command cannot detect when modules are overriding styling or when you're using macros.
To test these mappings, upload the theme to an account, then view the theme editor in that account (Settings > Website > Themes > View theme).
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