Formulator Field - Edit

Description

A field has a number of properties that determine its look and feel as well as its behavior. You can configure these properties in this tab. You can also use the TALES tab and the Override tab to associate dynamic behavior with field properties, though the Override tab is eventually to be phased out in favor of the TALES tab. Overridden fields will have their names be shown in square brackets.

Which properties appear in this view depends on what kind of field you are editing.

Each field has two sets of properties; widget properties and validator properties.

Widget properties

The widget properties determine the look and feel of the field that you see on the web page (which HTML code is generated for the field); i.e. what GUI widget you see.

A very common widget property shared by all fields is called 'Title'; all fields have titles -- the name you will see when the field is displayed on the screen.

Another very common widget property is the Default value of the widget. This is what will be filled in before the user changes anything to the form, unless you pass a value to the render function; see the API reference for more information.

Many widgets also have size information; the StringField for instance has a Display width property which determines how large the field should appear on the screen, as well as a Maximum input property that determines how much the user can enter (though this is independent from actual server-side validation).

For some widget properties such as Maximum input in StringField you can set the value to '0'; in that the HTML widget won't care how much the user inputs.

Validator properties

This set of properties determines how the field validates the information that is submitted for this field.

A very common validator property is the required property. If a field is required, the field cannot be left empty by the user when submitting a web page. Validation in that case will result in failure.

In case of the StringField, one validation property is called 'Maximum length'; the field cannot contain more characters than that.

For some validator properties such as Maximum length in StringField, you can set the value to 0. The validator will then not care how much the user entered -- there won't be any maximum.