Structured Text - Inline vs Linking Records

[Joshua.Evenson]

I’d like to be able to specify if a record can be inlined or linked in a Structured Text field. Currently, you have to allow both.

[bj.pearson]

I agree with this. We only want records to be “Linked” in structured text and don’t want to allow them to be inlined. We are currently just discarding on the frontend if someone adds an inline record as we don’t want to support them yet. It creates some confusion for content editors. Perhaps this option in the model editor could be split into two? or have a different UI where you can add record types and choose “Both” or “Links” or “Inline”…

[emil.hernqvist]

Very much interested in this as well. It’s quite detrimental to the UX to “allow” inline records when our client in fact does not.
Any potential for an official response on this?

[thomas.vanleynseele]

Hi @roger

We’ve also faced this in multiple websites.

Any chance you can take a look with the devs what the effort here would be?

Thanks!

[roger]

Thanks for the ping. I’ll check with our UX person on this!

[brett]

Hey @roger, any idea on the feasibility of this change being made? This has caused some confusion for our content editors & having the ability to separate these would be great.

[carynm]

Any update on the dev effort on this?

[roger]

Not yet, sorry @carynm and @brett (and everyone else)!

I’ve reminded our devs and UX people again just now. A few of them will be coming back from holiday soon and hopefully we’ll have a better idea then.

[roger]

While I’m asking them for an update, I also wanted to mention a potential, awkward workaround…

Since you get back similar data (the linked record ID) either way:

You might be able to process them on the frontend and treat them the same way, i.e., use a Structured Text Custom Renderer to rewrite links and inlined records into the same output HTML.

Would that help anyone here? Let me know if you need an example for that.

But I’ve pinged the devs again and I’ll report back as soon as I hear anything from them.

[roger]

Quick interim update: Heard back from a dev. They said yes, it makes sense why this would be helpful. However, it isn’t a trivial change and it will have to be considered and planned more thoroughly first — in other words, it’s not a quick fix. (But we knew that, since this has been open for 5 years already… )

I’ll provide further updates as I can.

[roger]

@thomas.vanleynseele, @brett, @carynm:

We’ve finally released this! Separate controls for record links and inline records in Structured Text fields

You can now choose whether you want to allow inlined records, links, or both:

This new setting can be be found in the field’s Presentation tab, as a UI toggle for your editors. The selection of which models to link to (rather than the how) remains in the Validations tab, as before.

The eagle-eyed among you might notice a small caveat: This system won’t allow you to define the “how” on a per-model basis. When you choose whether inlining and/or linking are allowed, the settings affects ALL related models. You cannot say “I want to only inline Model A and only link to Model B” — it’s all-or-nothing.

We hope this helps!