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Field Types / Repeater field

Note: You are currently reading the documentation for Bolt 3.7. Looking for the documentation for Bolt 5.2 instead?

A special field type available as a field definition is the repeater field type which allows you to compose an array-like structure of sub-fields within a single field name.

Basic Configuration:

The configuration of a repeating field set comprises the main field set name, along with the definition of the sub fields.

        features:
            type: repeater
            fields:
                repeattitle:
                    type: text
                repeatimage:
                    type: image
                    extensions: [ gif, jpg, png ]
                repeatcontent:
                    type: html

As you can see the field is configured with a type of repeater and then the sub-fields are configured under the fields attribute. In general you can include any valid fields within a repeater, there are a few that are not supported.

Note: Repeaters are useable with most of the available field types, except for a few where it would get too complex, or where it simply does not make sense to have more than one of. In short, do not use type: slug, type: block, type: repeater or type: templateselect as fields in your repeater. These fields will not work as expected.

You can drag-and-sort repeaters, but don't forget to save your record after sorting its repeaters.

If your repeater has one or more sub-fields with type: text, the first one will be used as the header of each individual repeater set. This is particularly useful when you need to sort your repeater sets and collapse them all prior to sorting them.

Example usage in templates:

When you want to use repeaters in your templates you will need to iterate over a set before you can access the individual fields.

The approach you use may vary slightly on whether you know the names of the fields within each set or if you want to allow your template to iterate over all the sub-fields without necessarily knowing the field names.

For instance if you just want to iterate over all sets and then all fields within the set then the template code will look like this:

{% for feature in record.features %}
    {% for field in feature %}
        {{ field.fieldtype }}:
        {{ field }}
    {% endfor %}
{% endfor %}

In the example above using {{ field }} will just output the value of the sub-field, if it is a text field such as like text, html, textarea or markdown. Since these are sometimes more complex fields you can use {{ field|showimage }} for images or {{ dump(field.value) }} to dump the value regardless of type. In practice, you'll often want to use the techniques described in the section below for individual fields to output the specific type of field in the layout you require.

If you know the names of the fields you want to render then you can fetch a field from the collection by name. For instance using the same example as above but knowing that our repeat set comprises the individual sub-fields companyname, telephone and email we can output the fields like this:

{% for company in record.companies %}
    <h2>{{ company.companyname }}</h2>
    <h4>Tel: {{ company.telephone }}</h4>
    <h4>Email: <a href="mailto:{{ company.email }}">{{ company.email }}</a></h4>
    <hr>
{% endfor %}

Images and thumbnails

You can use the image- and thumbnail filters for images inside a repeater contenttype, but the notation is slightly different. For example, if we have a contenttype with a sections repeater, acces them like this:

{% for section in record.sections %}
    <img src="{{ section.repeatimage|image(1200, 800, "r") }}"
        alt="{{ section.repeatimage.title }}">
{% endfor %}

Options

The field has three specific options:

  • limit: Limit how many sets an editor is able to create. If you omit this setting, then an unlimited number of sets can be created. The configuration for that option looks like this:
  • initial: How many empty sets are created initially. This defaults to 1 but when a sub-field is marked as required you may want to set it to 0 to ensure that a user must manually add a set first.
  • collapsible: Whether the separate sets of this Repeater are collapsible in the backend. This allows the editor to get a better overview, if there are multiple sets. The default is true, you can set it to false to disable this feature.
        features:
            type: repeater
            limit: 3
            initial: 0
            collapsible: false
            fields:
                repeattitle:
                    type: text
                repeatimage:
                    type: image
                    extensions: [ gif, jpg, png ]
                repeatcontent:
                    type: html


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