Under Community Review

Embedded Schema fields should be editable in Edit Popup in Experience Manager

Current state (Web 8 Experience Manager): It is already possible to add or remove Embedded Schema fields using the  or  icon. But you can only edit existing fields when they are visible on the website via Inline Editing or by opening the selected component in Form view. If you need to change not visible fields of the Embedded Schema it is not possible to do so via Inline Editing. I would like to avoid that Editors need to use the Open in Form view functionality as far as possible, but the Embedded Schema feature forces Editors to do so. This behaviour is kind of inconsistent as adding and removing Embedded Schema fields is already possible.

Future State: It would be better to have something "gear" button to open the currently selected Embedded Schema fields in an Popup (like the Popup that appear if you click the  icon) where you can edit the contents of the fields.

Arthur Nowottny

  • Discussing this behavior with our UX designers, I mentioned the ability to edit the embedded fields is important but I see the ability to see and edit just that set of fields as functionally equivalent to jumping to the embedded fields directly in a "form view" of sorts.

    I don't think the problem is in opening a large form view of fields per se, but rather in losing the context of the selected fields.

  • Thanks for your comment, but that's not really a great improvement imho. If you have a large schema, the user will be overwhelmed by all the fields. When you click on "Add", you also see just the relevant fields of the embedded Schema, which is much more convenient especially for casual users.  So it would be better to have the possibility to just edit the selected embedded Schema field so the user also just see the relevant fields (filled with the respective content).

  • Thanks for submitting the idea. In Experience Manager you can only edit field values inline that are rendered on the page. However since SDL Web 8 we introduced the ability to edit all of the fields of the component by clicking on the Edit button in the All fields  section of the properties box of the Component. This will prevent the need for Editors to open the whole component in form view and keeps the editing experience inside Experience Manager.